7'3" x 8'2" Wool and Silk Oriental Rug | Signed All Over Floral on Black | Made in Pakistan

At 7'3" x 8'2" this is a nearly square piece, an unusual footprint that suits a seating group set on all 4 sides rather than a long room. The field is jet black and completely covered in flowers, drawn so densely that the ground only shows through in slivers between leaves. The pile is wool with silk worked into the petals and leaf spines, which is why the same blossom reads gold from one end of the room and honey cream from the other. A small woven cartouche sits in the lower border, the mark of the workshop that produced it. The rug is in excellent condition with a full even pile and clean, hand-tied ivory fringe at both ends, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. This is an all over floral design, a flowering thicket that runs edge to edge: open peonies and wild roses, small 5 petal star blossoms, tight berry clusters, and long serrated leaves that curl and overlap like a real garden bed rather than a repeating stencil. The main border carries large pomegranate blossoms and sunflower rosettes alternating on the same black ground, with a sunflower dropped into each of the 4 corners so the pattern turns cleanly instead of colliding. Between field and main border sit 3 narrow guard stripes, the widest an ivory ribbon of trailing vine and rosettes that lifts the whole composition and keeps the black from closing in. Look closely at the petal work in the detail photographs and you can see individual flowers shaded through 4 and 5 tones, which is what separates a drawn design from a printed one.

A Black Ground Read in Green, Rose and Gold

The ground is a true black, not a very dark navy, and it does the work of a jeweler's cloth: everything laid on top of it gains a step of brightness. The greens carry the field, moving from deep forest through olive to a soft sage on the leaf undersides. Against them the flowers run rose pink into deep raspberry, butter yellow into warm gold, with ivory used as the outline color on petal edges and pale ice blue filling the larger leaves and tulip forms. The ivory guard stripe adds red and cornflower blue rosettes on a cream field. Because the silk sits in the highlights rather than across the whole surface, the pinks and golds shift as you walk around the rug while the greens and the black stay steady, giving the piece real depth under lamplight and by a window.

Woven in Pakistan to a Persian Drawing

This rug was made in Pakistan, where established workshops weave classical Persian floral cartoons on the traditional loom, knot by knot, and where the best of that work stands comparison with far more expensive pieces. The weave is fine and tight, with a short, closely clipped pile that holds the crisp outlines you see in the close-up photographs, and a cotton foundation that keeps the rug flat and square. The back shows small, regular knots and straight rows, the sign of experienced hands working to a set count rather than rushing the cartoon. Buyers comparing this sort of piece against Persian city work should read our guide to the difference between Persian and Oriental rug production, because the drawing, the silk highlights and the signed cartouche are exactly what tell you which workshop tradition a rug came out of.