7'5" x 10'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | All-Over Floral Field with Birds and Animals | Excellent Condition

This is a hand-knotted Persian Tabriz measuring 7'5" x 10'7", with a wool pile on a cotton foundation and a deep red field carried edge to edge by an all-over floral drawing. What separates it from the usual medallion Tabriz is the menagerie hidden in the vine work: long-tailed birds perched along the scrolls and small running animals threaded between the palmettes, drawn small enough that you notice them only once the rug is on the floor and you are standing over it. The pile is even, the ivory border is clean and unbroken on all 4 sides, and the condition is excellent with no repairs or wear visible in the photographs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field is a true all-over design, built on staggered rows of large serrated palmettes and split-leaf arabesques that repeat up the length of the rug and mirror across its width. Between them sit cusped rosettes with dark navy outlines, feathered lanceolate leaves and a fine tracery of ivory vine that ties the whole composition together. Birds appear in pairs facing one another across the vertical axis, while small pale gazelles and hares run through the lower and upper thirds of the field, a courtly garden theme the Tabriz workshops have drawn since the Safavid period. The ivory main border alternates a brown and navy palmette cartouche with an upright salmon and blue floral spray, framed on both sides by narrow navy guard stripes carrying a running vine.

A Red Field Framed in Ivory

The ground is a warm true red, closer to a ripe cherry than a brick or rust, and it reads evenly across the full 7'5" width with only the gentle tonal movement good hand-spun wool always gives. Against it the palette is deliberately cool: midnight navy for the outlines and the guard stripes, a soft sky blue and a dusty slate blue in the palmette petals, and clear ivory for the vine work and the animals, which is what makes the birds and hares read so crisply. Warm tones come from the chocolate brown palmette centers and the salmon pink and pale rose that lift the border out of the darker frame, with small touches of olive and gold in the rosettes. The ivory border does the heavy lifting in a room, throwing light back up at the edges and keeping the red field from feeling heavy under lamp light.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the country's most consistently commercial fine-weaving center for centuries, working on the Raj system and on cotton warps that hold a drawing straight over a long run. This piece is cataloged as coming out of Khoy, one of the weaving towns northwest of the city that works squarely in the Tabriz tradition and to Tabriz standards, which is why the curved vine and the small animal figures hold their shape rather than going blocky. The knotting is tight and regular, the selvages are firmly overcast and the pile has the dense, slightly crisp handle that Tabriz wool is known for, the kind of construction that takes decades of furniture and traffic without thinning. You can see more work from the region in our collection of Persian Tabriz rugs.