6'6" x 10' Persian Tabriz Pictorial Rug | 3 Panel Persian Monuments | Wool & Silk | Never Used

This is not a medallion rug with a picture added to it. The whole 6'6" x 10' field is given over to three framed panels stacked one above the other, each a woven painting of a famous Persian monument, and the burgundy border around them carries 8 scalloped cartouches that each hold a further building. It was woven in the 2000s and has never been on a floor, so the wool and silk pile still stands full and even, the ivory fringe is untouched, and the flat gray-blue end webbing is clean (see the final photograph, taken with a ruler against the edge). A piece this graphic sits comfortably in the practical 7 x 10 Persian rug range, whether you lay it down or stretch it on a wall as a tableau. It ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The top panel pairs a garden scene with a ruin: an arcaded pavilion sits behind a long water channel lined with clipped shrubs and dark cypresses on the left, while on the right a tiled portal rises broken out of a rocky slope, its arch still faced in blue mosaic. A single fluted stone column stands between them and repeats in the lower panel, tying the composition together. The middle panel is the Persepolis terrace, drawn with the ceremonial staircase, standing columns and gateways along the platform, 3 detached column bases in the foreground, a toppled carved shaft on the left with a relief figure still legible on it, and a mountain ridge behind. The bottom panel shows a turquoise domed shrine with a tiled iwan on the left and a colonnaded palace mirrored in still water on the right, and one of the panels carries a small caption in woven Persian script naming Chehel Sotoun Palace. Silver-gray arabesque bands, each strung with small rosettes, separate the three panels and echo the cartouches set into the corners and the centers of all 4 sides.

A Burgundy Frame Around Painted Color

The border ground is a deep burgundy, closer to wine than to tomato, and it carries pink and cream palmettes with sage and gold split leaves, which is what gives the rug its steady frame while the panels inside change constantly. Those panels run cooler: pale sky blue skies streaked with cream cloud, water in blue-green and silver, architecture in taupe, oyster gray, warm brown and rust, foliage in dark bottle green and olive, and fine black outlining that keeps every column and cornice crisp. Silk is used where light needs to move, across the water, the skies and the polished stone, so the same area reads bright from one direction and soft from the other. A quiet gray-blue outer band and matching end webbing cool the whole thing down at the edges, which is why the rug photographs as a piece of art rather than as a red rug. If you are shopping the family of burgundy Persian rugs, this one brings blues and grays along with it.

Woven in the Tabriz Tradition

Tabriz, in the far northwest of Persia, is the country's oldest continuous commercial weaving city and the one town whose workshops took pictorial weaving seriously as a discipline. Tabriz weavers measure fineness in Raj, knots per gereh across the width, and pictorial work sits at the top of that scale because shading a face of stone or a bank of cloud means changing color every few knots rather than every few inches. That is visible here in the column flutes, the relief carving on the fallen shaft and the reflections in the water, none of which survive at a coarse weave. The rug is built the Tabriz way, a cotton foundation under a wool pile with silk reserved for highlights, and the back shows a tight, regular weave with straight selvages and level ends. Collectors who follow Persian Tabriz rugs tend to look for exactly this combination: a workshop drawing, an unused pile, and a subject that names the places it depicts.