6'8" x 10'6" Persian Sarouk Rug | Navy Floral All Over Field | 1980s Vintage, Excellent Condition

This 6'8" x 10'6" Sarouk reads formal from the doorway and turns personal once you are standing on it. The field is a deep navy that goes nearly black where the light falls away, and instead of a single central medallion it carries detached floral sprays packed from one end to the other. The pile is a generous 3/8" wool, the handle is firm and heavy for the size, and after roughly 4 decades the dyes have settled into the slightly powdery, softened palette that buyers of Persian Sarouk rugs look for. Hand-knotted on a cotton foundation in the 1980s, it comes to you in excellent condition with full pile, straight sides and complete ivory fringe at both ends, and it ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is classic Sarouk all over work: staggered rows of flowering sprays, curled acanthus leaves and 8 petal rosettes, each bouquet drawn as its own small composition and separated from its neighbors by open navy ground. Down the center line, a few of those bouquets expand into larger lozenge shaped clusters, so the eye still finds a spine through the field without the rug ever committing to a formal medallion. Floral vases and arched leaf fans anchor both ends. The border system runs 5 bands deep: a narrow blossom stripe at the edge, a blue guard with scrolling vines, the wide salmon main border filled with alternating palmettes and rosettes on a leafy meander, a second blue guard, and a fine inner line that frames the field cleanly. Among 7x10 Persian rugs this drawing style is one of the easier ones to live with, because the repeating pattern hides daily traffic and lets you place furniture anywhere on the field without cutting a medallion in half.

The Navy, Salmon and Rose Palette

The ground is a true indigo navy blue, dark enough to look almost black in the close-up photographs and to throw every flower forward. Against it the weaver used a wide range of accents: clear rose red and deep burgundy in the petals, cream and ivory for the outlined blossoms and leaf tips, a dusty sage and olive green in the foliage, soft gold and mustard in the fan shaped leaves, and warm rust orange with cocoa brown filling the shaded sections. The main border shifts the whole rug warmer, reading as a salmon pink that leans coral in daylight and softer peach under lamps, with mid blue guard stripes on either side holding the two temperatures apart. There is a gentle variation in the navy across the field, the natural result of hand-dyed wool worked from different batches, and it gives the surface depth rather than a flat printed look.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a weaving town in the Arak district of central Persia, and for more than a century its looms have been known for 2 things: heavy, long wearing wool and a floral vocabulary drawn with more care than most village work. Sarouk weavers build on a strong cotton warp and beat the wefts down hard, which is why these rugs sit flat, hold their rectangular shape and survive generations of furniture and foot traffic. The reverse of this piece, shown next to a 12 inch rule in the last photograph, is tight and regular with each row clearly legible, the design showing through the back almost as crisply as it does on the front, which is the mark of an even hand and a disciplined weave rather than a hurried commercial one. That combination of a dense 1980s town weave, a 3/8" wool pile and a pattern that never tires is what keeps a Sarouk of this size in service decade after decade.