6'7" x 10'3" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Field & Rose Border | Wool & Silk, Signed Ali Ghaffari

This is a workshop Tabriz of the kind that is drawn first and woven second, and you can see the drawing in every line of it. The field is cream, almost buttermilk under daylight, wrapped by a soft rose pink border, and the whole surface is lifted by silk highlights that catch the light wherever the vines turn. It was woven in the 2000s, has never been on a floor, and the end panel carries a designer cartouche, which in Tabriz means the cartoon was the work of a named hand rather than a shop pattern. At roughly 500 knots per square inch the detail holds down to individual flower stamens and bird heads no bigger than a fingernail. Among room sized 7 x 10 Persian rugs this one sits at the top end of what northwest Persia produces. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

A lobed central medallion sits on the cream ground, outlined in deep burgundy and filled with a coral cartouche and a small garland of green and rose blossoms. Paired bird heads flank the medallion at each side, a Tabriz flourish that shows up again in the spandrels. From the medallion the field opens into a dense arabesque of scrolling vines, split leaf palmettes with feathered tips, sunburst rosettes and curling cloud bands, all drawn in perfect mirror symmetry along both axes. The 4 corners carry large ornamented vase and bouquet compositions, and pendant palmettes reach north and south from the medallion. The main border repeats an alternating sequence of footed urns and open rosettes on rose pink, framed inside and out by ivory guard stripes filled with small palmette scrolls, and finished at the ends with a golden flowerhead stripe above the cotton fringe.

A Cream Field With Rose, Coral and Olive

The palette is unusually soft for a Tabriz of this fineness. The ground is a warm cream that reads ivory in daylight and pale sand under lamps, and against it the weaver ran a full spectrum of pinks: dusty rose in the larger rosettes, hot pink in the flower centers, coral and salmon through the medallion core and the smaller buds. Mauve and burgundy carry the outlines and the vine work, orange and rust give the palmettes their heat, and olive and moss green run through the leaves to keep the pinks honest. Small hits of light blue and pale aqua appear in the flowerheads, with navy used sparingly for the finest detail lines. The border is a quieter blush pink with beige guards, so the field stays the brightest part of the rug. Because the highlights are silk, the wool and silk surface shifts tone as you walk around it, one direction pale and matte, the other luminous.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz has been the design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, and its workshops measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches. This piece sits in the high range where the curved line can be drawn without stepping, which is why the vine scrolls hold their sweep and the bird heads keep their shape. The pile is clipped short so nothing softens the outline, the cotton foundation is tight and flat, and the back shows the even, small, regular knot grid of a supervised loom rather than a village one. The cartouche at the end panel reads "Iran Tabriz, Dezigner: Ali Ghaffari", naming the designer who produced the cartoon, and a signed cartoon in Tabriz is the mark of a commissioned piece rather than production work. Unused since it came off the loom, the pile still stands full height with the original sheen intact.