8'1" x 11'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Navy Medallion on Raspberry Red Field | Wool Pile, 2000s

This 8'1" x 11'2" Persian Tabriz was hand-knotted in wool in the 2000's and has come back to us in excellent condition, with a full, even pile and clean selvedges on all 4 sides. It is a true room-size piece that sits comfortably in the 8x11 Persian rug range, wide enough to carry a sofa and a coffee table or to float under a dining table with chairs pulled back. The drawing is urban workshop work: a single lobed medallion, matched ivory corner spandrels, and a field of flowering vine that mirrors precisely across both axes. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording the origin, materials and exact measurements shown above.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a stepped, lobed medallion built in 3 layers: an ivory cartouche-shaped core with a small 8 petal rosette at its heart, a ring of ivory arabesque scrollwork, and a navy ground studded with rosettes and slender serrated leaves. Above and below it the medallion extends into tall pendants tipped with palmettes. The surrounding field is not a plain ground but a dense curvilinear lattice of split palmettes, cloud-band vine, blossoming branches and small boteh paisley forms, all drawn with the flowing line that marks a cartoon-based workshop weave rather than village improvisation. The 4 corner spandrels are ivory and carry oversized paisley boteh filled with flowering sprays, which gives the field its diagonal rhythm. A single wide main border of boteh and large rosettes runs the perimeter, flanked by camel-ground guard stripes of meander vine and tiny 4 petal flowers, and finished with a narrow orange-outlined reciprocal edge.

Color: Raspberry Red, Indigo Navy and Ivory

The field is a cool raspberry red, closer to cerise than to brick, and the wool has enough luster that the tone shifts between deep cherry and soft rose as you walk around it. Against that, the main border and the medallion ground are a saturated indigo navy, which gives the composition hard contrast at the edges and quiet depth at the center. The palette inside the drawing is where this rug earns its place among multicolor red Persian rugs: olive and sea green leaves, pale celadon, dusty rose, apricot and burnt orange highlights, light sky blue rosette centers, warm camel in the guard bands, and clean ivory for the arabesques and spandrels. The ivory is bright rather than yellowed, and the fringe is a natural cream. Nothing in the palette is abrasive, so the rug reads formal from a distance and surprisingly playful up close.

Tabriz: Workshop Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia, in Azerbaijan province, and has been the country's commercial weaving capital for centuries. Its workshops weave from a drawn cartoon rather than from memory, which is why a Tabriz medallion closes cleanly at the corners and why the vine on one side of the field answers the vine on the other almost knot for knot. Tabriz weavers measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots counted across a gereh of about 2.75 inches, and even at a mid-range Raj count the city's cotton warps and tightly packed wool wefts produce a flat, stable rug that holds its shape under furniture. On the back of this piece the knotting is regular and the pattern is legible row by row, the mark of a disciplined loom. The wool from the pastures around Tabriz is strong and slightly glossy, which is why pieces of this generation still show full pile after years on a floor.