7'11" x 10'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Wool & Silk Floral Medallion | 400 KPSI, Signed & Never Used

This 7'11" x 10'2" Tabriz was woven in a workshop that clearly had time on its side. The ivory field is filled edge to edge with fine curling vinework, the central medallion is drawn in maroon and camel with a starburst rosette at its heart, and the upper guard border carries a woven cartouche, which on a Tabriz almost always means a named weaver or atelier stood behind the piece. The pile is wool with silk worked into the highlights, so the pale ground shifts in brightness as you walk around it. It has never been on a floor: the pile stands full height, the ends and sides are original and tight, and it slots neatly into the popular 8 x 10 Persian rugs footprint. A certificate of authenticity ships with the rug.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classical Tabriz medallion formula executed at close range. A lobed central medallion sits over the ivory field, built up in concentric rings: an inner 12 petal rosette, a band of small scrolling arabesques on maroon, then a ring of pink and camel cloudbands that break into small vase and blossom cartouches around the rim. Pendants rise and fall from the medallion on the long axis, each one a small palmette crowned with a tulip spray. Around all of it the field is not empty for a single inch. Split leaves, serrated saz leaves, red and navy blossoms, pomegranate palmettes and hair-thin tendrils run in mirrored pairs across both halves. The 4 corner spandrels are drawn in camel brown and step inward with their own dark green leafwork, which gives the field a defined oval shape without a hard outline. The main border carries a meandering vine of palmettes and rosettes, framed by narrow guard stripes of small 8 petal flowerheads, and the outer minor stripe repeats a tiny cypress and blossom motif all the way around.

A Soft Ivory Field Framed in Sage Green

The field reads as a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than white, and the silk in the pile gives it a faint gold cast under lamplight. Against that ground the drawing is worked in a muted, slightly antique palette: camel and cocoa brown for the larger leaves and the spandrels, dusty rose and brick red for the blossoms, and small hits of slate blue and denim blue in the flowerheads that keep the whole thing from going monochrome. The medallion is the darkest area, a maroon oxblood centre ringed with soft salmon and taupe. The main border is the surprise, a quiet sage green that is unusual in this design and reads almost celadon in daylight, filled with the same rose, blue and chocolate florals. Ivory and apricot guard stripes separate the green from the field so the border never crowds the centre. It is a low-contrast, dressy colorway that sits comfortably on oak and walnut floors and works with cream, olive, camel and muted blue upholstery.

Tabriz Weaving and the Quality of This Piece

Tabriz, in northwest Persia, is the city that made the curvilinear medallion carpet famous and it still measures its own work by the Raj system, the number of knots counted across a gereh of about 2.75 inches of width. At roughly 60 Raj, or about 400 knots per square inch, this rug is well above commercial Tabriz production and into the range where the fine drawing you see here is actually possible: unbroken curved stems, leaves with three or four shades inside them, and floral heads no wider than a fingernail. The reverse photo shows the result, a tight even grid on a cotton foundation with no slack rows and perfectly straight selvages. The weaver signed the piece in the border, which in Tabriz is a mark of a workshop that expects the rug to outlive everyone in the room. Unused, with full pile and a lustrous wool and silk surface, it is ready for another lifetime of service.