6'6" x 8'3" Indian Tabriz Mahi Rug | Wool and Silk | Ivory and Black

A 6'6" x 8'3" rug hand-knotted in India in wool and silk, worked in the Tabriz Mahi drawing. At a glance it is a very dark centre inside a pale frame: a near-black field carrying a tiny repeating lattice, a lobed medallion on a sand-coloured ground at the middle of it, and a wide ivory border of leaf and boteh forms running all the way round. The weave is fine enough that the field pattern reads as texture from standing height and only resolves into separate motifs close up.

Design

The field is filled edge to edge with the Herati repeat, the small diamond with its hooked leaves and rosette that gives the Mahi, or fish, design its name. Over it sits a scalloped medallion outlined in pale green, with a black-ground cartouche at its centre holding four large palmettes around a single rosette. Two matching pendants run out along the long axis, and smaller floral roundels sit either side of the medallion. The corner spandrels are drawn in the same lattice on a camel ground, cut away in a deep lobed line. The main border carries alternating palmettes and curled boteh on ivory, with narrow guard stripes of meandering vine on camel and a plain red outer edge. This is a rectangular format with white cotton fringe at both ends.

Colour

The ground is so dark it reads as black in the photographs, though in raking light it is closer to oxblood, a burgundy laid over a near-black outline. Against it the lattice is picked out in ivory, soft olive, pale slate blue and rust, each motif small enough that the colours blend into a warm mid-tone at a distance. The spandrels and medallion ground are camel and sand, a full step lighter than the field, which is what makes the medallion outline so legible. The border is a cool ivory with salmon, moss green and brick in the palmettes, and the thin red selvedge line at the very edge ties back to the rust running through the field.

Making

Hand-knotted in India with a pile of wool and silk, the silk showing as a sheen on the medallion flowers and on scattered motifs in the field where it catches the light differently from the wool around it. The back, shown folded in two of the photographs, is even and tightly packed, with the border drawing just as clear from behind as from the face. The rug is new and in perfect condition, with full pile, intact selvedges and both fringes complete.