6' x 8'8" Pakistani Tabriz Rug | Wool | Red and Navy

A hand-knotted rug from Pakistan measuring 6' x 8'8", worked in fine wool on a red ground with a wide blue-black border. The pattern is a Tabriz one, the curvilinear medallion-and-corner layout associated with that Persian town, and the weave here is close enough to hold the small leaves and flower heads without blurring them. Seen whole, it reads as a dense red field carrying a single pale medallion, framed in dark blue.

Design

The centre holds a stepped, eight-lobed medallion on a navy ground, with a pale blue rosette at its core and a cream pendant dropping from each end. The field around it is filled edge to edge with a small-scale floral vine: open palmettes, rosettes, curling serrated leaves and slim boteh, all drawn at roughly the same scale so nothing dominates the medallion. Four large ivory corner cartouches cut into the field and repeat the medallion's palmette work at a larger size. The border system is unusually layered for a rug of this size: a broad navy main band of alternating rosettes and leafy palmettes, flanked by a pale blue floral stripe on each side, with narrow ivory and red guard stripes between them and a dark green inner band that separates field from border. The rectangular format keeps the corner pieces symmetrical at both ends.

Colour

The field is a true madder red, cool rather than orange, and it darkens toward brick where the pile falls away from the camera. Against it the main border is a blue-black so deep it holds its own against the field rather than receding, and the drawing inside it comes forward in rose, ivory and light sky blue. A bottle green runs in the inner band and through the leaves, which is the darkest note in the rug after the border. Ivory does most of the work of separating one zone from the next, in the guard stripes and in the corner cartouches, and a soft rose repeats often enough in the flower heads to warm the whole palette.

Making

Hand-knotted in fine wool on a cotton foundation, with the warps left as a plain ivory fringe at both ends, shown in the close photograph next to a ruler. The pile is cut low, which is what allows the half-inch rosettes in the guard stripes to stay legible. The rug is new and in perfect condition, with no wear, no repair and full pile throughout. At 6' x 8'8" it falls in the 6x9 range, and it sits alongside the rest of our hand-knotted stock.