5'1" x 8'7" Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Red | Rectangular

A hand-knotted Persian rug in a rectangular format, 5'1" x 8'7", with a deep red field, a stepped navy and ivory medallion holding the centre, and a wide camel-brown border running around the whole. At arm's length it reads as red and gold; close up the drawing is busy with small flowerheads, hooked leaves and checkerboard panels in pink, light blue and green. The condition is listed as excellent, and the pile in the photographs stands up evenly with the knots clearly defined.

Design

The Bakhtiar drawing here is of the medallion type rather than the garden panel type. A navy eight-pointed star sits at the centre, outlined in ivory, carrying a red lobed rosette in its middle with a small green and blue flower at the very heart; blue and orange combs and ladder motifs fill the navy ground around it. That star rests inside a large ivory cartouche whose lobes run out into pendants top and bottom, and the ivory ground carries blue rosettes with yellow eyes, pink buds and dark green serrated leaves. Beyond it the red field holds broad corner spandrels, large leaf and palmette forms outlined in navy, and small square checkerboard blocks scattered through the ground. The main border is camel-brown with alternating red rosettes and dark palmettes joined by a thin vine, flanked by mid-blue guard stripes of small white and red flowerheads.

Colour

The field is a true madder red, slightly cooler and deeper in the close-up photographs than in the full view, and it does most of the work. Against it sit two anchors: navy, almost black where the medallion ground is densest, and an undyed-looking ivory that lifts the centre and the border guards. The camel-brown of the main border is the third weight, warm and a little olive in raking light, and it keeps the red from meeting the room edge directly. Smaller quantities carry the detail: salmon pink in the big leaf forms, a clear mid-blue in the rosettes and guard stripes, apricot orange in the medallion fillers, and a dark bottle green in the leaves. The pink and the orange are what keep the palette from reading as a plain red and blue rug.

Making

The rug was knotted by hand in Persia to the Bakhtiar design of the Chahar Mahal villages west of Isfahan, where this medallion layout and camel-ground border are standard work. The back, shown in the last photograph, gives a regular grid of knots with the pattern legible through it and the camel border reading brown from behind, and the ends finish in a plain ivory fringe. Condition is given as excellent, with full pile across the field and no thinning visible in the images. It is one of the hand-knotted pieces where the drawing has been kept tight to the cartoon rather than improvised, which is why the two halves of the medallion mirror each other so closely.