6' x 9' Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Wool & Silk Floral Medallion | 60 Raj, Approx. 400 KPSI

This 6' x 9' Persian Tabriz was woven at 60 Raj, roughly 400 knots per square inch, which is the level where a Tabriz workshop stops producing floor covering and starts producing drawing. The pile is a blend of wool and silk on a cotton foundation, clipped low at 3/8" so that every hair-thin outline in the field stays legible, and the silk catches light along the vine work as you walk past it. It is a recent piece in perfect condition, never laid down, with no wear, no repairs and no restoration. Among 6x9 Persian rugs this is the size most people actually need, and this one arrives with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Tabriz curvilinear medallion. At center sits a small stepped medallion built around an 8 petal rosette, framed in sky blue and seated on a soft taupe cartouche that is itself filled with tiny blossoms. From the medallion the field opens into an all-over system of thin scrolling vines, split palmettes, feathered dark-blue rosettes and sprays of small pink and white flowers, all drawn in perfect mirror symmetry along both axes. Taupe spandrels close the 4 corners of the field and repeat the same arabesque vocabulary at larger scale, with curling cloud-band tendrils in pale blue running through them. The main border carries alternating palmettes and lotus heads linked by a continuous vine, held between narrow navy-outlined guard stripes and finished with an outer ivory band of single roses and leaf buds. Nothing in the drawing is approximate: the outlines are one knot wide, which is only possible at this knot count.

Ivory, Coral and the Colors in Between

The field is a warm ivory, closer to cream than to white, and it does most of the work by staying quiet while the ornament moves across it. The main border is coral, a soft salmon tone with an apricot warmth that reads as pink in daylight and deepens toward terracotta in lamplight, and it is the color that gives this rug its personality. Against those two grounds the palette runs through pale sky blue and deep navy in the rosettes and outlines, olive and grass green in the leaves, taupe and mushroom in the medallion and spandrels, and clear cerise pink, wine burgundy and dark aubergine in the flower heads. A scatter of pure white silk highlights sits at the center of many blossoms. It is a light rug overall, an easy match for oak floors, pale plaster walls and warm neutral upholstery, and it belongs with the ivory and beige Persian rugs rather than the deep reds.

Tabriz: the Town and the Weave

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the commercial and technical capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the town that supplied court designs, master cartoon draftsmen and the workshop discipline that other regions copied. Tabriz grades its own work in Raj, the number of knots counted across a gereh of about 2.75 inches of width: 40 Raj is commercial, 50 Raj is fine, and 60 Raj, the count here, is the point where a piece is considered collector grade and takes a weaver far longer per row. Combining that count with a wool and silk pile is deliberate, since the silk carries the fine outlines and the highlights while the wool carries the wear. The weave is tight and even across all 54 square feet, the selvedges are firm, and the rug lies flat without a wave, which is what a properly beaten Tabriz foundation should do.