6'6" x 10' Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool and Silk Pictorial Medallion | 500 KPSI | 1980s Never Used

Woven in Tabriz in the 1980s and kept in storage ever since, this 6'6" x 10' rug came off the loom at roughly 500 knots per square inch in wool with silk highlights, which is workshop drawing rather than village work. The pile still stands full and square, the ends and sides are original, and the signature cartouche is woven into the end border rather than added later. A piece at this knot count holds a curved line the way a pen does, and that is exactly what the detail photographs show. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording the origin, materials and knot count. Among 7 x 10 Persian rugs, a fully pictorial Tabriz in unused condition is an uncommon thing to find.

Design and Motifs

The field is a full garden narrative rather than a repeat. A lobed rose medallion sits dead center with a small stepped rosette at its heart, framed by paired cloud bands and feathered leaves. Around it the cream ground fills with deer and gazelles browsing, camels at rest, perched songbirds, jeweled caskets, footed vases and a many-branched chandelier hung with drops, all mirrored exactly across both axes. Pendant cartouches run top and bottom over a rose panel of urns. The main border is the piece that makes this rug: a procession of robed figures in Achaemenid dress, one seated with a staff receiving two standing attendants, alternating with gray-blue reserves holding vases, scrolling vine and running hares. Inner guard bands carry pink lotus heads over green striping, and a narrow animal band of stylized creatures separates field from border on all 4 sides.

Cream Ground, Rose Medallion and a Lilac Border

Cream is the dominant color, an unbleached ivory that lets every small motif read clearly. The medallion is a dusty rose red, deepening to brick at its outline and lightening to a powdered pink at the center rosette, with charcoal navy used only for the tight scrollwork inside. The main border shifts to a soft lilac mauve, with the figural reserves set on pale gray-blue that cools the whole frame. Detail work runs through sky blue and sapphire in the palmettes and blossoms, olive and tobacco brown on the animals and vases, burgundy for the small florets, and beige and taupe through the vine. Silk is used sparingly and deliberately on highlight lines, so the leaf edges and the chandelier drops catch light and shift tone as you walk past. The overall effect is pale and luminous rather than saturated.

Tabriz Weaving and Loom Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's commercial and technical weaving capital for centuries. Fineness there is measured in Raj, the count of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in, and the better ateliers push into the range where a cartoon can be drawn like a miniature painting. At approximately 500 knots per square inch on a fine cotton foundation, this rug is well past commercial grade and into the territory where faces, hooves, vase handles and the folds of a robe can be rendered with only a few knots each. The pile is clipped low so nothing blurs, the selvedges are tight, and the back shows a dense, even grain with no pull or waviness across the 6'6" width. It is the sort of weaving that rewards being looked at closely for a long time.