8'10" x 12'1" Persian Tabriz Rug | Compartment Panel Medallion | 200 KPSI, Signed, Never Used

At 8'10" x 12'1" this piece lands squarely in the range buyers shop when they search 9x12 Persian rugs, which is the size most American living and dining rooms are furnished around. What makes it worth a second look is the drawing. Instead of a single open field, the weaver laid out a compartmented plan: a tall center panel carrying a lobed medallion, a flanking panel on each long side, and a wide panel across the top and the bottom filled with quatrefoil rosette groups. The pile is soft natural wool on a cotton foundation, knotted at roughly 200 knots per square inch, and a small woven signature cartouche sits in the inner border, which tells you this came off a workshop loom rather than a village one. The rug is new, has never been on a floor, and ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center panel holds a lobed medallion built up in concentric rings: an 8 petal rosette at the core, a scalloped surround, then a cusped outline that breaks into hooked leaf tips. Above and below it sit small crown pendants, and the ground around it is filled with fat curling arabesques and thin flowering vine, drawn with the curved line Tabriz workshops are known for. Each long side carries a single elongated cartouche panel with its own miniature medallion and vase forms. The top and bottom panels are the showpieces: 4 quatrefoil lobes clustered around a central rosette, each lobe framing a palmette, with square cornerpieces and pale cartouches pinned between them. The main border runs a repeating sequence of palmettes, blossoming vases and split leaves, framed inside and out by narrow guard stripes and a serrated dart band at the very edge, so the whole field reads as a set of framed pictures rather than one continuous pattern.

A Neutral Palette of Beige, Sage Green and Salmon

The ground shifts gently from ivory in the center panel to a warmer camel beige in the outer panels and the border, which is why the layout reads clearly without any strong contrast. The medallion works in salmon and dusty rose against a soft sage green surround, and that same sage returns in the quatrefoil lobes top and bottom, in the vase motifs of the border, and in scattered leaves through the field. Brown carries the outlines, the vine tracery and the leaf tips, giving the pattern its structure. Scattered through the drawing are small notes of pale blue, a clear sky blue in the border palmettes, mossy green, apricot and cream, with just a few dark navy accents inside the rosette centers to sharpen them. There is no red field, no black ground and nothing loud anywhere in the rug, so it settles into oak floors, greige walls and mixed wood furniture instead of competing with them.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's design capital for centuries, the place where cartoon drawing, curved line work and panel layouts of this kind were developed and then copied everywhere else. Weavers there count fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in, and a rug at roughly 200 knots per square inch like this one is a solid, dense workshop weave rather than a loose commercial grade. You can see it in the photos: the back shows small, even, tightly packed knots with crisp definition on the vine and the rosette outlines, the handle is firm, and the wool has the soft, slightly lustrous surface that takes light well. Those are the qualities that separate real Persian Tabriz rugs from decorative lookalikes, and this one is signed, new and unworn from selvage to selvage.