6'2" x 8'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Pictorial Monuments & Persepolis Border | 70 Raj Wool & Silk, Never Used

This 6'2" x 8'9" Tabriz is a picture rug rather than a pattern rug. Instead of a medallion, the weaver laid out 3 framed scenes stacked down the field, each one a recognizable piece of Persian architecture, separated by bands of woven poetry and flanked by 2 full height columns with carved capitals. It was woven in the 1980s in wool with silk drawn through the highlights, kept rolled since, and has never been on a floor. The pile is full, the silk still flashes when the rug is turned against the light, and the fringe and edges are untouched. A certificate of authenticity ships with the rug.

Design and Motifs

The top cartouche frames a terraced palace with a colonnaded pavilion, a blossoming tree, cypresses and a pool, captioned in Persian script as Kakh-e Shirin. The center band holds 2 domed monuments side by side, a brick facade with a turquoise dome labeled Soltanieh on the left and a tiled portal labeled as the Sheikh mosque on the right, both set against a soft teal sky with cypress trees between them. The lowest cartouche shows a tall fluted brick tower rising over a striped landscape with a small dome and a bare tree beside it. Around the scenes the weaver added 4 arched niches with standing guards holding spears, 4 corner panels with covered vases and long necked ewers, and a wide procession border of marching figures copied from the stone reliefs of Persepolis. The outermost green band runs a continuous file of small lions, deer and horses, and 2 narrow inscription panels of poetry divide the 3 scenes. Every element is drawn in curved line, which is what a 70 Raj weave is for.

A Salmon Red Field with Green, Teal and Cream

The stated main color is red, and in this rug it reads as a warm salmon to terracotta that carries the niches, the corner panels and the wide figure border. Against it the scene panels drop into a cool teal and soft sea green sky, with pale green spandrels holding cream cartouches and large open roses in deep rose pink and wine. The outer guard band is a clear grass green, the animals on it picked out in cream and brown. Architecture is built in brown brick tones, tan stone and turquoise tilework, with the domes shaded from pale sky blue into deeper teal. Black is used sparingly and deliberately, as the fine outline around each cartouche and as the ground for the 4 dark teal vase panels in the corners. Cream silk carries the calligraphy, the column shafts and the highlights on the water and the terraces, so those details lift off the wool as the light moves across them.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and is the one city that built its reputation on workshop precision rather than village character. Fineness there is counted in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches: 40 Raj is commercial work, 50 is fine, 60 is collector grade at about 400 knots per square inch, and 70 Raj, near 700 knots per square inch, is the ceiling only the best Tabriz ateliers attempt. A pictorial cartoon like this one cannot be woven any coarser, because the faces of the guards, the Persian script and the tile patterns on the portals all depend on knots small enough to draw a curve. Among 6x9 Persian rugs a signed-quality pictorial at this weave is unusual, and the back photograph with the ruler shows how tight and even the knotting runs right out to the selvage.