5'1" x 8'1" Persian Nain Rug | Signed 9La Wool and Silk | Ivory Field, Never Used

This is a signed, never used 5'1" x 8'1" Persian Nain rug woven in 9La quality with wool and silk pile on a cotton foundation. The weaver put his name in a small cartouche at the top of the field, which tells you the loom belonged to a workshop confident enough to sign its work. The pile is still full and squared off, the fringe untouched, and the silk outlines around the flowers catch the light exactly as they did when the rug came off the loom. At 61" x 97" it sits comfortably under a coffee table, at the foot of a bed or in a home office without crowding the walls. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, knot construction and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field is built around a dish shaped central medallion whose core is an 8 petal rosette set in a small indigo cartouche, ringed by a wreath of tiny round florets and then by a scalloped band of leaf tips. Slender pendants run off the medallion at top and bottom into the open ivory ground, where curling arabesque vines carry palmettes, lotus heads and small feathered leaves outward to all 4 corners. The spandrels repeat the medallion vocabulary in quarter form, and each blossom is drawn with a thin dark outline so the shapes read cleanly rather than blurring together. The main border runs a continuous vine of palmettes and split leaves, flanked on both sides by narrow guard stripes with a repeating heart shaped hook motif, a detail that Nain looms use almost as a fingerprint. The drawing stays curvilinear throughout, with no broken lines or shortcuts where the vine turns.

An Ivory Ground Worked in Light Blue, Indigo and Beige

The ground is a warm ivory that shades slightly toward cream where the silk catches light, and it carries the whole design rather than competing with it. Against it the weaver worked two distinct blues: a soft powder light blue used for petals, vine tips and the inner guard stripes, and a deep indigo used for outlines, the medallion core and the main border framing lines. Between them sit quiet beiges and a soft camel tone in the palmettes, with small touches of dark brown in the stems and occasional dots of oxblood in the border rosettes and heart motifs, visible in the corner and border close-ups. A few leaves carry a muted sea green. The overall effect is cool and restrained, which is why buyers looking at ivory and beige Persian rugs keep returning to Nain: it sits under almost any furniture without dictating the room.

Nain Weaving and the 9La Grade

Nain sits on the edge of the central Persian desert, east of Isfahan, and its looms are young by Persian standards: the town spun fine wool cloth for generations before turning to knotting in the mid 20th century, bringing the Isfahan drawing tradition with it. Nain fineness is described by the La system, which counts the number of threads twisted into each warp: the fewer the threads, the finer the weave. This rug is a 9La, the workhorse grade of good Nain production, dense enough to hold the curved vinework crisply while keeping the pile durable underfoot, and it uses silk only where it counts, as outlining around the flowers and medallion. Collectors who want to see where the scale ends should read our guide to 6La and Habibian Nain rugs. A signature cartouche on a piece this size is uncommon and adds a provenance detail that most Nains of this format simply do not carry.