6'9" x 10'7" Persian Bakhtiari Garden Rug | Wool | Multicolour

A garden carpet in the Bakhtiari manner, measuring 6'9" x 10'7", knotted by hand in Persia with a pile of wool. The field is cut into small square compartments, five across, each one holding a single subject: a flowering spray, a handled vase between two cypresses, a curling boteh, a rosette. A wide ivory border carries the whole thing. Seen from across a room it reads as a patchwork of red, indigo and cream; up close every square is a separate small picture.

The design

The compartments are divided by narrow ladder bands of ochre and red studded with tiny four-petalled flowers, so the grid itself is drawn rather than merely implied. The subjects repeat but not in strict order: pink cabbage roses on ivory, a vase with white blooms flanked by dark cypress trees on a red ground, a large white boteh with its tip hooked over, an eight-pointed star rosette, and in one indigo square a bird perched beside a tiered garden pavilion with roses around it. The main border runs an ivory ground with palmettes, split leaves and small animal and vine forms, held between red guard stripes of rosettes and a dark outer line.

The colour

The dominant note is a brick red, warm and slightly orange where the pile catches light, set against an indigo so deep it goes to black in the darker squares. Ivory panels break the rhythm and keep the grid from closing up. Within the squares the palette is genuinely multi-coloured: rose pink in the large roses, moss and bottle green in the leaves and cypresses, chocolate brown, ochre, a clear mid-blue and small touches of orange and yellow in the flower centres. The ivory border, lighter and cooler than the ivory of the field panels, frames the lot.

How it was made

Hand-knotted in Persia with a wool pile, dated in the table to the 1980s, which puts it in the semi-antique range. The back, shown against a ruler in the last photograph, is evenly knotted and the drawing stays legible from the reverse. Condition is given as perfect, with full pile and a clean pale fringe at both ends. It is a rectangular piece of a size that sits well under a dining table, and one of the hand-knotted rugs we hold with a panel field rather than a central medallion.