6'6" x 9'10" Persian Tabriz Rug | Cream and Pale Blue Wool and Silk Floral Medallion | 2000s

A light, formal city piece from northwest Persia, woven in the 2000s on a cotton foundation with a low 1/4" pile of wool and silk. The silk is used the way good Tabriz workshops use it, in the fine outlines, the tendrils and the petal centers, so the drawing lifts off the field as the light moves across the room. At 6'6" x 9'10" it sits squarely in the most useful of all sizes, and buyers cross-shopping 7 x 10 Persian rugs will find very few in this palette with this level of detail. The rug has never been used, the fringe and selvages are untouched, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a small 8 petal rosette medallion drawn in rose, ivory and deep wine, kept deliberately compact so it reads as a focal point rather than a block of color. Above and below it, two large pendant palmettes anchor the long axis, each cradled by curling split leaves and thin navy vine work that runs out into the open field. Between them the ground is filled with an even scatter of small flowerheads, saffron yellow blossoms, green leaf sprays and pink buds, all connected by hair-fine scrolling stems. The 4 corners carry generous spandrels worked in ivory with olive and gold cloudband scrolls, and the main border repeats a meandering vine set with bouquets, rosettes and small navy leaf clusters, framed by narrow guard stripes of rust and cream. It is curvilinear drawing throughout, with no straight lines anywhere, and the symmetry holds from side to side and end to end.

A Cream Field Washed With Pale Blue

Cream is the governing color, running through the border, the spandrels and the outer field, with a cool light blue haze filling the central ground behind the medallion so the two tones meet without a hard edge. Warm beige and sand carry the vine scrolls, and gold and olive give the cloudbands their weight. The accents do the real work: soft rose and dusty pink in the bouquets, saffron and orange in the small blossoms, two greens in the leaves, one bright and one deeper sage, and navy blue used sparingly in the stems, the leaf tips and the tiny border florets to give the whole surface definition. The silk in the pile catches light in the pinks and creams first, which is why the rug changes character between morning and evening. It belongs with those beige and ivory Persian rugs that brighten a room instead of grounding it.

Tabriz Weaving and Workshop Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most disciplined weaving city for centuries, working on upright looms with the Raj system, where fineness is counted as knots per gereh across the width. That system is why Tabriz can draw a curved line cleanly: a floral medallion of this kind only holds its shape at a high knot count, and the low clipped pile here proves the count is there, since a coarse weave cannot be shorn this short without losing the pattern. The close photograph of the reverse shows the knot nodes running tight and even, the wool and silk yarns well spun, and the leather-bound edge finished by hand. Wool from this region takes dye deeply and wears hard, and the silk accents are placed for contrast rather than to pad the price, which is the mark of a proper city workshop rather than a rushed commercial loom.