5'9" x 8'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Black Field Wool & Silk Floral Medallion | Brand New

This is a brand new, never used Persian Tabriz woven in wool with silk through the highlights, and it reads exactly the way a good Tabriz should: a deep black ground packed with flowering vine, an ivory medallion at dead center, and an ivory border wide enough to frame the whole thing without crowding it. At 5'9" x 8'9" it sits in the most useful part of the range of 6x9 Persian and Oriental rugs, large enough to carry a sofa and coffee table as shown in the room photograph, compact enough for a study or a formal bedroom. The pile is still full and upright, the fringe untouched, and the silk catches light on the pale flowers whenever you change your viewing angle. Every rug we ship, including this one, comes with a certificate of authenticity listing origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is the classic Tabriz medallion and corner layout, worked in curvilinear line rather than village angles. At the center sits a small ivory and olive cartouche holding an 8 petal rosette, ringed by a burgundy outline and then by a large ivory star shaped medallion built from paired palmettes and leafy half rosettes. Above and below the medallion a tall ivory pendant palmette runs toward each end, flanked by sprays of pink and ivory blossom on fine brown vines that cover the entire black field with almost no empty ground. Each of the 4 corners carries a burgundy spandrel filled with the same floral vocabulary, so the field is bracketed on every side. The main border is an ivory vine scroll alternating big open rosettes with shield shaped palmettes, held between narrow guard stripes of trailing flowers, and the outer edge finishes in black so the border does not float away from the field.

The Black, Ivory, Green and Burgundy Palette

The field is a true inky black, close to a very dark midnight in raking light, and it does the job a pale field never can: it makes every light color on top of it look brighter than it is. Against it the weaver worked ivory and soft cream, warm buttery beige in the larger palmettes, olive and sage green in the leaves, and a run of salmon pink and dusty rose in the smaller flowerheads, with occasional pale blue centers and small notes of brown. The burgundy is used sparingly and deliberately, as the outline around the central medallion and as the 4 corner spandrels, which pulls your eye straight to the middle of the rug. The border reverses the balance, ivory ground with green, rose and tan flowers, so the perimeter reads light and the interior reads deep. Where the silk falls, mainly on the pale blossoms and the medallion tracery, the color shifts slightly as you walk around the rug.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz, in the northwest of Persia, has been the commercial and technical capital of Persian weaving for centuries, and its workshops measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches of width. That system exists because Tabriz drawing depends on it: the flowing curved vine, the tight rosette and the crisp palmette outlines you see here only hold their shape at a high knot count on a tight cotton foundation. This piece shows the hallmarks, a firm handle, straight sides, a low even clip that keeps the detail legible, and silk placed as highlight rather than used for show. Work in this tradition also comes out of satellite towns such as Marand, weaving to the same standards within the Tabriz group. If you are comparing pieces, see the full selection of Persian Tabriz rugs and judge the back, the outline control and the clarity of the border scroll on each one.