6'9" x 9'11" Persian Tabriz Rug | Black Floral Medallion with Silk Highlights | Excellent Condition

A black ground is the hardest field a Tabriz workshop can take on, because every line of the drawing has to hold itself against the dark and any hesitation in the outlining shows immediately. This 6'9" x 9'11" piece holds it beautifully: an ivory medallion floating on a jet black field, framed by a wide champagne border that lifts the whole rug off the floor. The pile is fine wool worked with silk highlights, so the roses, vine tips and cartouche fillings catch the light and change tone as you move around the room. It sits in the most usable range of 7 x 10 Persian rugs, big enough to anchor a full seating group and still easy to place. It ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a shaped ivory medallion built around a lidded urn and a covered vessel, wrapped in scrolling acanthus and ringed with open roses. Above and below it, pendant cartouches carry a pair of lamp forms and a small crown, drawn in navy and lilac against pale gold. The black field between them is filled with a continuous vine of serrated palmettes, half rosettes and curling leaves, none of them repeating quite the same way. All 4 corners are resolved with stepped ivory spandrels, each holding its own urn cartouche and a chain of tiny blue and pink blossoms that drops toward the field. The main border runs a rhythm of rounded cartouches with rose bouquets alternating with striped vessel forms, separated by scrolling brown vinework, and the whole thing is contained by a black outer band of pointed leaves and a fine pink dotted inner line.

A Black Field Lit by Pink, Ivory and Soft Gold

The field is a true deep black with no brown cast, which is what allows the pinks to read so clearly. There are several of them: a pale blush in the medallion roses, a warm rose in the border bouquets, and a stronger coral used to outline the medallion and the spandrel edges. Around those sit champagne and ivory in the borders, a chalky sage green in the cartouche grounds, soft gold in the vine outlines, and small notes of navy and lilac in the lamp and blossom details. Brown is used for the drawing lines rather than as a color of its own. The Persian silk rugs tradition shows here in the highlight work: the silk passages sit slightly lower than the wool and reflect light, so the ivory border can look pale gold from one side of the room and nearly white from the other. Cream cotton fringe finishes both ends.

Woven in the Tabriz Tradition of Northwest Persia

Tabriz has been the commercial and technical center of northwest Persian weaving for centuries, and its workshops are the ones that made the curved line their specialty. A design like this one, with its French influenced rose bouquets and flowing acanthus scrolls, only works at a high knot count, because a coarse weave turns those curves into steps. The back of this rug, visible in the fold photographs, shows a tight and even grid on a cotton foundation with the pattern reading almost as clearly from the reverse as from the face, which is the honest test of a workshop piece. The wool is fine and closely clipped so the drawing stays crisp, and the silk is reserved for highlights rather than used across whole areas, the restrained way the better Tabriz ateliers handle it.