6'7" x 10'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool & Silk Floral Medallion | 60 Raj, Signed Cartouche

This is a workshop-grade Tabriz in the pastel palette that the best Tabriz ateliers reserve for their wool and silk production: a cream field, a soft peach medallion and silk-highlighted drawing that changes tone as you walk around it. At 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, the vine work stays thin and continuous rather than breaking into steps, and the silk sits in the flower heads and leaf tips where it catches the most light. The back shown in the last photograph gives the honest measure of that knot count. It is a recent piece in perfect condition, one of the more usable proportions among 7x10 Persian rugs, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and knot count.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is the classic Tabriz curvilinear formula, executed lightly. A shaped medallion sits dead centre, its cusped peach outline enclosing a pale inner pool with a small ribbed rosette at the very middle, and a pendant palmette rises from each end. Around it the cream field carries an all-over network of thin scrolling vines, split arabesque leaves, lotus palmettes and small clustered flower heads, mirrored precisely along both axes. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the medallion's colouring in a paler tone and are filled with feathered leaf scrolls and long-tailed bird forms worked in silk. The main border runs a repeating sequence of footed urns and woven flower baskets spilling blossoms, separated by curling vine, and is framed by narrow guard stripes in ivory and blush. At one end of the field a small woven cartouche in Persian script marks the weaver or workshop, the usual sign of a named atelier piece rather than an anonymous commercial weave.

The Cream, Peach and Light Blue Palette

The field is a warm cream, closer to clotted ivory than white, and it holds the whole design together. Against it the medallion and main border are drawn in peach and coral, deepening to a soft terracotta at the border's core and fading to blush in the narrow inner stripe. The medallion's inner pool and the spandrels shift to a muted light blue with a faint grey-green cast, an unusual and very deliberate contrast that keeps the warm tones from turning sweet. Fine rust and brick outlines carry every stem and petal edge, which is what gives the pattern its crispness at this knot count. Scattered through the vine work are pale blue leaf flecks, beige, soft rose and touches of gold, most of them in silk, so the colour reads differently from each end of the room. It is a genuinely light rug that sits comfortably on pale oak, limestone or a warm grey floor without fighting the furniture.

Tabriz Weaving and the Raj System

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organised weaving city for centuries, working from full cartoons with designers, master weavers and finishers as separate trades. Fineness there is measured in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches: 40 Raj is ordinary commercial work, 50 is fine, and 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, is where a rug crosses into collector grade. That density is what allows the curved vine in this piece to stay smooth instead of jagged, and it is why the silk highlights register as individual flower heads rather than smudges of colour. The pile is wool with silk on a cotton foundation, clipped low so the drawing stays legible, and the Turkish knot on a tightly packed warp gives a rug of this weight real structural life underfoot. Woven recently and never put into service, it arrives with full pile height and squared, evenly bound ends.