6'1" x 8'10" Indian Tabriz Rug | Silky Wool | Burgundy and Midnight Blue

A hand-knotted rug measuring 6'1" x 8'10", woven in India in soft lustrous silky wool. The field is burgundy, dense with fine floral scrollwork, and a single pale starburst medallion sits at the centre. The wide border is so dark it reads as black until light catches the flowers in it. Seen from across a room the rug looks almost monochrome and sombre; close up, as in the detail photographs, it breaks into gold, olive, sea green and small spots of coral.

Design

The Tabriz design here is the medallion-and-all-over type rather than the open-ground kind. A sixteen-point star medallion in ivory and camel, filled with curling cloudband scrolls around a small burgundy rosette, anchors the centre, with matching quarter corner pieces reaching in from the four corners of the field. Between them the ground is covered edge to edge with thin vines, serrated leaves, palmettes and small eight-petal rosettes, drawn at a scale fine enough that the pattern only resolves at a metre or so. The main border runs a repeating vine of large blossoms and leaf sprays on near black, set between a broad gold guard stripe and a narrower slate blue one on either side. The rectangular format holds all of this in strict symmetry along both axes.

Colour

The field is a deep burgundy, closer to wine than to brick, and it darkens where the pile lies away from the light. Against it the border is near black, and the drawing inside both is carried in gold, straw and ivory, which is what keeps the rug from closing up entirely. The quarter medallions and the minor stripe bring in midnight blue, and the leaves run from olive to a cool sea green. Small accents of coral and pink appear in the border blossoms. The overall effect is dark and even, with the gold guard stripe doing most of the work of separating field from border.

Making

Hand-knotted in India, with a pile of soft lustrous silky wool on a cotton foundation, the ivory warps left as fringe at both ends. The back, shown folded over in one of the photographs, is tightly and evenly knotted, and the pattern reads clearly through it. The rug is new and the condition is listed as perfect: full pile throughout, clean selvedges in burgundy wool, and fringes unworn.