6'6" x 9'11" Persian Khorasan Rug | Gold Field Animal & Floral Design | 1960s Signed Estate Piece

This 6'6" x 9'11" Khorasan rug came out of a private estate, and it is the kind of animal pattern piece that was woven to be looked at closely rather than walked on hard. The gold field is filled edge to edge with flowering vine, and living in that vine are grazing gazelles, perched parrots, pheasants in flight, peacocks and a pair of crouching lions, every one of them outlined knot by knot in black and ivory so the silhouette stays crisp. The wool is fine, tightly spun and low cut, which is why the drawing holds detail this small at 78 by 119 inches. It is one of the most usable proportions we stock, sitting right in the 7x10 Persian rugs range, large enough to anchor a sofa and two chairs without swallowing a room. A red signature cartouche is woven into one end border. The rug ships with our certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials, age and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. The design is a true all-over composition built on a continuous arabesque that climbs the field in mirrored halves, hung with large lobed palmettes, split leaves, rosettes and small carnations. Woven into the scrollwork are 2 crouching lions low in the field, paired parrots facing a central palmette, long tailed peacocks standing at the border line, pheasants with speckled wings, and gazelles caught mid stride among tufts of grass and flowering shrubs. The main navy border repeats the same idea in reverse: ivory antelopes and small running hounds stepping through a cream vine, with a red cartouche set at one end. Two narrow guard stripes of connected rosettes frame the whole thing, and the corners are resolved cleanly rather than cut off, which is the tell of a worked out cartoon rather than an improvised one. The animals are the reason to buy this rug, and they are drawn with real anatomy, horns, hooves and turned heads all legible from standing height.

A Warm Gold Field Against Deep Navy

The field is a soft honey gold that shifts toward ivory camel where the pile lies away from you and toward a deeper wheat tone where it leans in, the natural sheen of good Khorasan wool. Against that ground the main border is a near black navy blue, dark enough at a glance to read as ink, and the palmettes repeat that navy in their centers so the border and field stay tied together. The secondary colors are quiet and old: olive and sage green in the leaves, a dusty rose and soft salmon pink in the flower petals, terracotta rust in the smaller blossoms, and deep oxblood red reserved for the cartouche and a few flower hearts. Ivory does the outlining work throughout, on the animals, the split leaves and the guard stripe rosettes, and gray green appears in the grasses and some of the bird bodies. Black is used as a fine drawing line rather than as a mass. The overall effect is warm and mellow, a gold and navy palette that works over wood floors and reads as neutral in a formal room without going cold.

Khorasan: Weaving in Northeast Persia

Khorasan is the northeastern province of Persia, and its weaving revolves around Mashad, the city that has organized the region's workshops for generations. Khorasan wool is long stapled and takes dye with a soft luster, which is why the region's pieces age into exactly this kind of mellow gold rather than fading flat. A pictorial animal design on a cotton foundation at this level of detail is workshop work, not village work: the cartoon has to be drawn, the knot count has to be high enough to turn a gazelle's leg in 3 knots, and the finishing, the fine selvedge and hand tied fringe visible in the back photographs, has to match. If you collect in this area, our guide to Persian Mashad rugs covers the structure and the workshop names, and you can see what else is currently in stock among our Mashad rugs. For the checks that place a weave like this one in the 1960s, from dye behavior to pile wear and fringe construction, see how to date an oriental rug. Sixty years on, the pile on this one is still full and the drawing is still sharp.