7'3" x 10'9" Persian Kashan Rug | Ivory Allover Floral Field | Signed Workshop Cartouche

This is the light, quiet side of Kashan weaving: a 7'3" x 10'9" room-size piece worked on an ivory ground rather than the familiar deep red, with a signed cartouche set into the upper border. The wool is the soft, lustrous type Kashan is known for, hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a close 3/8" pile that still holds crisp definition in the small flowers, which is the first thing to check on a pale rug. Condition is excellent, with full pile edge to edge, clean selvages and original ivory fringe. A signed piece from this town means a workshop piece rather than a village weaving, and pieces like this are usually bought by people who want the drawing of a formal Persian rug without the weight of a dark palette. Every rug we ship carries our certificate of authenticity. For background on the town, its workshops and how to read quality in this group, our guide to Persian Kashan rugs is worth a few minutes before you buy.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Kashan formula drawn in a softer register. A lobed central medallion sits in the middle of the field, built around a small 8 petal rosette and ringed by cupped palmettes and 4 anchor rosettes in copper and gold, with a pendant finial pointing to each end. Around it the field is not left open: it is filled with a continuous allover system of curling arabesque vines, split leaves, tiny carnations, rosettes and half palmettes that mirror perfectly across both axes, so the eye keeps finding repeats without the pattern ever going stiff. The 4 corners carry matching quarter spandrels that echo the medallion's drawing rather than blocking it off in solid color. The border scheme runs to several bands: a main band of alternating palmettes and leaf sprays on a beige ground, flanked by narrow reciprocal and floral guard stripes and finished with a fine outer meander. Image 4 shows the woven cartouche worked into the top border, the signature that marks this as a named workshop piece.

The Ivory and Beige Palette

The ground is ivory moving into warm beige, with just enough natural variation across the width to prove the wool was dyed in small lots. Against that pale field the drawing is outlined in deep navy, which does all the structural work: it defines the medallion's lobes, the vine scrolls and the stems, and keeps a light rug from looking washed out. The florals themselves are picked out in terracotta and rust copper, soft mustard gold, pale sky blue, a muted sage and touches of dusty rose, with small ivory highlights inside the rosette centers. The border sits a shade warmer and sandier than the field, so the two read as separate planes instead of merging. The overall effect in a room is neutral and bright, closer to a plaster and parchment scheme than a jewel-tone one, which is why buyers searching ivory and beige Persian rugs tend to land on Kashans woven this way. It will carry oak, walnut, linen upholstery and brass without competing with any of them.

Kashan: The Town and the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its reputation goes back to the Safavid court workshops: this is one of the towns where the curvilinear medallion format was refined into a formula that the rest of the weaving world then copied. Local wool is soft and takes a high sheen, and the town has always worked on a cotton foundation with a tight, level knot count, which is what allows the tiny carnations and split leaves in this field to stay legible instead of blurring. Kashan is also the rug most Americans have already seen without naming it: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. The reverse view in image 6 shows the grain of the weave against the ruler, small regular knots in even rows, and the handle that follows from it: firm, flat lying and dense enough for decades of real use in a main room. A signed workshop piece in this size and palette does not turn up often.