6'6" x 10'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool & Silk on Silk Foundation | Signed, Never Used

A workshop Tabriz woven in wool and silk on a full silk foundation, still carrying the tight, unworn handle of a rug that has never been walked on. The fringe in the photographs is the silk warp itself, knotted off at both ends, and the back shown against the ruler tells you what the front is doing: a very fine, even knot count that holds a curved line without a stutter. The weaver signed the piece in a small cartouche set into the end border, which is the mark of a named atelier rather than a village loom. At 6'6" x 10'2" it sits squarely in the most useful of the 7x10 Persian rugs range, large enough to anchor a seating group and still light enough to move. A certificate of authenticity is included with every rug we ship.

Design and Motifs

The center is a layered star medallion built outward from a small rosette: an inner ring of sage and ivory petals, then a salmon ground carrying paisley scrolls, then 8 ivory cartouches each filled with its own miniature flower spray, and finally a ring of pointed lobes that gives the medallion its star silhouette. Long floral pendants run north and south, and the 4 corner spandrels repeat the same ivory palette so the composition reads as one drawing rather than separate parts. The field between them is not left open: it is packed with spiraling vines, small palmettes, curled saz leaves and single rosettes, all outlined in dark brown so the pattern stays legible against the deep ground. The main border is ivory, alternating large lily palmettes with paired rosettes and fine tendrils, flanked by narrow guard stripes of arabesque scrollwork and an outer burgundy edge that frames the whole piece.

A Burgundy, Ivory and Green Palette

The field is a true burgundy, closer to wine than to fire red, and it deepens or lightens depending on which way the pile is brushed. Against it the ivory does most of the work: the medallion core, the spandrels and the full main border are all worked in cream and bone tones that keep the rug from feeling heavy. Green appears in two registers, a soft sage inside the medallion petals and a stronger leaf green in the border foliage and the small vine sprays. Supporting those three are rose pink and salmon in the flower heads, pale sky blue in the border rosettes, and a warm tan that shades the arabesques. Where the silk is used, mainly in the medallion, the vine outlines and parts of the border, it reflects light differently from the wool, so the pattern shifts slightly as you walk around it. Dark brown outlining holds every element in place and keeps the pastels from bleeding into one another.

Tabriz Weaving and Workshop Quality

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the country's most commercially serious weaving city for centuries, measuring its own fineness in Raj, the number of knots counted across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches of width. The city's best ateliers do two things that separate them from village production: they draw on paper first, so the curved line is genuinely curved, and they weave on silk rather than cotton when the design demands more knots per inch than a cotton warp can carry. That is exactly what has happened here. A silk foundation is thinner and stronger, which lets the weaver pack the knots tighter and render the tiny cartouche flowers and hair-thin vine tendrils you can see in the close-up. Silk in the pile also behaves differently from wool underfoot and under light, something worth understanding before you buy, and our guide to Persian silk rugs covers it in detail. The signed cartouche, the unworn pile and the perfectly straight selvedges all point to the same conclusion: this is a named workshop piece that went straight from the loom into storage.