5' x 8' Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool and Silk Floral Medallion | Naghshe Jahan Workshop, 1980s

This 5' x 8' Persian Tabriz was woven in the 1980s by the Naghshe Jahan workshop in Tabriz, and the paper atelier label is still attached to the back, which is rare on a rug of this age. The pile is fine wool carrying silk in the highlights, knotted on a cotton foundation, and the silk does exactly what it is meant to do: the pink garlands and the pale outlines around the medallion pick up light and shift as you walk past. At 5' x 8' it sits in the most useful size class in the house, large enough to anchor a seating group or float under a small table, still light enough for one person to move. The pile is full and even from end to end, the ends and sides are original, and every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is classic Tabriz workshop layout: a lobed coral medallion with a navy inner cartouche and an 8 petal rosette at its exact center, finished top and bottom with scrolling pendants that run away into the field. Four corner spandrels repeat the coral of the medallion and are outlined in the same brown vine, so the eye reads the whole field as one drawing rather than four separate quarters. Between them the ivory ground carries bouquets, cypress-like blue sprays, hanging garlands of small pink blossoms and curling acanthus leaves, all mirrored precisely across both axes, with a tone-on-tone cream tracery filling the ground around the spandrels. The main border is a coral band of palmettes, cream leaves and blue rosettes on a serpentine brown vine, framed by navy guard stripes and a pair of narrow flower-head minor borders. The curved line is drawn cleanly right into the corners, which is the test of a well-cartooned Tabriz.

Ivory Ground, Coral Medallion and Deep Blue Accents

The field is an ivory that leans warm, closer to cream and soft butter than to a cold white, which keeps the rug easy next to oak floors and beige upholstery. Against it the medallion and main border read as a soft coral, a terracotta red with a salmon cast rather than a hard tomato red, and the medallion core drops to a deep navy blue that gives the center its weight. The secondary palette is where the rug earns its money: rose pink and powder pink in the garlands, mid blue and pale sky blue in the flower heads, sage and pine green in the leaves, small strikes of gold and pale yellow in the border palmettes, and dark brown outlining almost every stem. Because the silk sits in the pinks and the pale outlines, the coral looks warmer from one direction and cooler from the other, so the rug never flattens out under a single light source.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the organizing center of the Persian rug trade for centuries, the city where cartoon drawing, dyeing and knotting were split into separate trades and done to a standard. Tabriz weavers count fineness in Raj, knots per gereh across the width, and a named workshop piece like this one was woven to a set count with a master's cartoon rather than from memory. The back shown here is tight and regular, the knot rows are straight, and the design holds its curves at the medallion tips and spandrel corners, all marks of shop production rather than village work. Wool and silk together are the Tabriz signature combination, wool for durability underfoot and silk reserved for the details that need to catch light. Browse more wool and silk Persian rugs if this weave is what you are after.