6'7" x 10'2" Persian Bijar Rug | All Over Floral Tabriz Design | Excellent Condition

Pick this one up and you understand it before you look at it. A Persian Bijar rug weighs far more than its size suggests, and this 6'7" x 10'2" piece is no exception: a hand-knotted wool pile on a cotton foundation, beaten down so tightly that the rug lies board flat and holds its shape without help. The drawing is pure Tabriz workshop, a fine all-over floral repeat on a black ground, but the body and handle are Kurdish Bijar. It has never been used, the pile stands full at 3/8", the ends and sides are original and sound, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity. Among 7x10 Persian rugs this is the size that anchors a seating group without crowding the walls.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. The field is a mirrored all-over repeat: rows of blossoming plants rising from thin vine stems, each crowned by a large curved leaf or boteh, with palmettes, 8 petal rosettes and small four-flower clusters filling every space between them. Look at the close detail and you can see how carefully the pattern is balanced, one half answering the other across the center line, with the same motif redrawn in a different color each time so the repeat never reads as mechanical. The main border carries alternating diamond cartouches and dark rosette panels on a red orange ground, framed on both sides by ivory guard stripes of turning vine and by narrow blue-grey reciprocal bands. The corners resolve cleanly, which on a repeat pattern this fine is the tell of a weaver working from a proper cartoon rather than improvising at the end.

A Black Field Framed in Red Orange

The ground is black, deep and even, reading almost ink blue where light crosses the pile at an angle. Against it the palette is unusually broad for a Kurdish weave: ivory and cream in the larger leaves, soft salmon and dusty rose in the blossoms, sage and bottle green in the foliage, pale sky blue in the small filler flowers, plus touches of brown, gold and terracotta. Because the background is dark, every one of those lighter tones lifts off the surface, and the rug changes character depending on whether it sits under daylight or lamplight. The main border shifts the whole thing to a warm red orange, a clear brick tone rather than a blue-red, with black rosette panels and ivory cartouches punctuating it. Ivory guard borders and the natural cotton fringe keep the outer edge bright, so the dark field is contained rather than heavy.

Bijar, the Iron Rug of Persia

Bijar sits in Kurdistan in western Persia, and its weavers built their reputation on one habit: beating each row of knots down with a heavy metal comb while the warps are held under extreme tension. The result is a fabric so compressed it is nearly indestructible, which is why the trade has called Bijar the iron rug of Persia for well over a century. Weavers there have long borrowed refined city cartoons, and this piece takes a Tabriz floral repeat and executes it in the dense Bijar handle, with tough highland wool that resists crushing in traffic. If you are comparing pieces, the differences between Bijar, Bijar Zanjan, Bijar Tekab and Bijar Bukan come down to exactly this combination of weave density and drawing, and this rug sits at the finer, more urban end of the group.