6' x 9'2" Turkish Kerman Rug | Wool | Navy and Ivory

A hand-knotted rug from Turkey measuring 6' x 9'2", worked in wool on a Kerman drawing. The field is an open ink navy with one slender medallion at the centre and the flowers pushed out to the edges, so most of what the eye lands on is plain ground. The border is ivory, filled with cartouches of woven script, and the whole thing sits in a rust outer band. It is a rectangular piece in the 6x9 range.

Design

The centre holds a small pointed medallion with a lozenge core, a ring of dense flowerheads around it and a curling pendant above and below, each pendant tipped with a scrolling leaf. Everything else is pushed to the perimeter: bunched floral sprays, flowering vases and single blooms arranged in an unbroken garland that follows a scalloped line around the open ground, so the field reads as a dark pool with a flowered rim. The main border is an ivory band of pointed cartouches carrying lines of script, separated by rust-ground panels with an eight-petalled rosette in each. Narrow rosette-and-vine guards run inside and outside it, and a plain red selvedge finishes the edge.

Colour

The ground is a deep navy that goes nearly black where the pile lies away from the light and opens to ink blue where it lies toward it. Against that, the flowers are drawn in salmon pink, ivory and a muted rust red, with olive green in the leaves and a clear mid-blue in the smaller rosettes. The ivory border is the brightest thing on the rug and gives the dark field a hard edge; the rust outer band repeats the red of the flowers and keeps the two values from falling apart. The green is used sparingly, mostly in foliage, and reads as a cool break between the pinks and the reds.

Making

Hand-knotted in wool in Turkey, with cotton fringe left long at both ends and the back showing an even, legible knot across the border pattern. The table dates it to the 1980s, which places it with the semi-antique stock, and condition is recorded as excellent to perfect, consistent with the full pile in the close photographs. It is one of the Turkish-woven Kerman-design pieces among the hand-knotted rugs here: the drawing belongs to the Persian city of Kerman, the knotting does not.