7'11" x 11'10" Persian Kashan Rug | Ivory Field, Blue Floral Medallion | Signed Cartouche

This is the quiet, light-ground version of the Kashan formula rather than the familiar red one, and it is a harder piece to find. The field is ivory, the drawing is carried almost entirely in blues, and a signed cartouche sits woven into the upper border, which tells you the piece left a named workshop rather than an anonymous loom. At 7'11" x 11'10" it covers a standard 8x12 floor plan with the seating fully on the rug, and the 3/8" wool pile still stands up cleanly across the whole surface. Every rug we sell, this one included, ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

A lobed central medallion anchors the field, outlined in a firm dark blue and filled with a layered rosette and small curling leaf forms, with a pendant finial reaching out at each end. The 4 corner spandrels answer it in the same vocabulary, so the eye reads the composition as a single balanced design rather than a medallion dropped onto a pattern. Between them the ground carries a dense all-over scroll of palmettes, serrated leaves and small blossoms on thin vines, drawn in the curved line that separates city weaving from village work. The main border runs a repeating palmette and vine cadence framed by narrow floral guard stripes on both sides, and the signature cartouche breaks that rhythm once at the top, the single asymmetry in an otherwise strictly mirrored layout.

Ivory Ground Worked in Layered Blues

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to cream than to a cold white, and it takes light without glaring. The blues do the real work and there are several of them: a deep near-navy for the outlines and medallion frame, a mid cornflower blue for the larger blossoms, and a pale powder blue that fills the medallion center and lifts the whole middle of the rug. Against that cool range the weaver placed small hits of gold, soft rust and brown in the flower heads and leaf tips, plus the occasional single red knot used like punctuation. The border sits a shade warmer than the field, a sandy ivory with the same blue drawing over it, so the frame reads as part of the same palette instead of a hard edge. An ivory and blue scheme like this settles easily into rooms built on cream, grey, pale wood or soft blue, which is exactly why light Kashans sell faster than they come in.

Kashan: The Town and the Weaving Standard

Kashan sits in central Persia north of Isfahan, and its looms have been working in the Safavid court tradition for centuries, which is why a persian kashan rug is the piece most people picture when they think of a Persian rug at all. Watch Shark Tank and there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. The town's reputation rests on soft lustrous local wool and on drawing accurate enough to hold a curved vine over 12 feet without wobbling, and the back of this piece shows the even, tight knotting that makes that possible. A signed cartouche raises the bar further, since a weaver only puts a name into the border of a piece meant to be looked at closely. Among large Persian rugs in the 8x12 range, a signed ivory-ground Kashan in excellent condition is the kind of piece that stays in a family.