6'7" x 9'10" Persian Ardakan Rug | Wool | Ivory and Blue

A hand-knotted rug from Persia measuring 6'7" x 9'10", a medium room size in a plain rectangular format. The spec table names the design Ardakan, a weaving town in central Persia whose workshops draw on the same pattern book as Kashan, and the rug reads that way at a glance: an ivory field carrying an all-over floral pattern in blue and soft brown, held inside a wide ivory border. Condition is given as excellent, and the pile stands evenly across the whole surface in the photographs.

Design

There is no central medallion. The field is covered corner to corner by a scrolling vine that links rosettes, split palmettes and serrated leaves, the whole thing laid out in mirrored repeats so the pattern reads the same from either long side. The close photograph shows the drawing clearly: eight-petalled rosettes with a single red dot at the centre, curled leaf cartouches enclosing smaller blossoms, and fine tendrils that thread between them without crowding the ground. The main border runs on an ivory ground with alternating flowerheads and palmettes on a continuous vine, flanked on both sides by narrow guard stripes of small repeating blossoms. Centred in the top border is a small cartouche with a signature woven in Persian script, picked out in dark indigo on pale ground.

Colour

The ground is ivory running to a warmer beige where the pile turns, and it carries most of the surface. Against it the blues do the work: a deep indigo for outlines and the larger palmettes, a mid cornflower blue for the leaves, and a pale sky blue used in thin lines in the guard stripes and at the edges of flowers. Tobacco and walnut browns fill many of the smaller leaves and give the pattern its warmth, and single points of coral red sit at the centres of the rosettes. The effect is quiet rather than high contrast, because no colour is darker than the indigo and the ivory never gives way.

Making

Hand-knotted with a 3/8" wool pile, as the table records. The back photograph, shown against a rule, gives the knotting an even, close grain with the pattern legible from the reverse, and the ends finish in plain ivory fringe. It is one of the hand-knotted rugs we stock where the drawing is fine enough that details such as the border cartouche come through at full size without losing their outline.