6'9" x 10' Persian Nain Rug | Navy Blue Floral Medallion | Wool & Silk, 1980s, Never Used

Rugs of this type are what made the town famous, and this one has been kept off the floor its entire life. Woven in the 1980s, it has a cotton foundation, a short 3/8" pile of fine wool with silk worked into the outlines, and the kind of crisp, unflattened surface you only see on a piece that was never walked on. Silk shows up where the light hits it: the medallion rosettes, the leaf edges, the thin outlines around every blossom. Among Persian Nain rugs this is the classic reading of the design, and at this proportion it sits comfortably with other 7x10 Persian rugs under a seating group or a dining table. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is built around a single ivory toranj medallion with 8 lobed petals, each petal filled with its own small flower head and ringed by a tight band of rosettes. From the medallion the drawing opens into large curling arabesque scrolls that sweep out toward the 4 corners, carrying palmettes, split leaves and little 5 petal blossoms on brown stems. The ivory spandrels at the corners repeat the medallion vocabulary in miniature, so the eye reads the same shapes at three different scales. The main border is a reciprocal run of boteh style curled leaves and rosettes on ivory, bracketed by blue guard stripes and a soft rose outer band, and the whole border system is drawn in curved line rather than the stepped angular style of village weaving. Every vine closes where it should, which is the sign of a properly cartooned workshop piece.

A Deep Navy Blue Field Against Ivory and Light Blue

The ground is a dark navy blue that reads almost ink black in the close-up photographs and settles into true navy when the rug is seen flat under daylight. Against it, the ornament is carried almost entirely in ivory and cream, with a second register of light blue flower heads and leaves that keeps the field from going heavy. Brown and rust appear as thin outlines and in the hearts of the rosettes, giving the pattern definition at arm's length, and small touches of soft rose and beige warm the medallion and the outer band. The borders reverse the balance: an open beige to ivory ground with pale sky blue blossom vines and dark navy accents, so the rug frames itself in light. Because the silk takes dye differently than the wool, those outlines shift tone as you walk around the rug, which is most visible across the medallion in the angled views.

Nain: The Town and the Weave

Nain sits on the edge of the central Persian desert, east of Isfahan, and its rug industry is young by Persian standards, growing out of a fine wool cloth trade in the 1930s. The weavers took the Isfahan drawing tradition, the curved line, the flowing vine, the single formal medallion, and applied it to a short clipped pile with silk outlining, which became the look the town is known for worldwide. Quality in Nain is graded by the number of threads twisted into each warp bundle, with fewer threads meaning a finer, denser weave, and the hallmark of the town is that the back is tidy and even from edge to edge. This piece shows that discipline: a firm handle, straight selvedges, hand-tied cotton fringe and a pile so lightly used that the knot heads are still sharp under the ivory border.