8'11" x 12'5" Persian Tabriz Rug | Red Field, Teal Floral Medallion | Excellent Condition

A full room size Tabriz in the classic formal taste: an open red field, one large round medallion drawn in teal-green, and ivory corners heavy with flowers. The exact dimensions are 8'11" x 12'5", which sits squarely in the 9x12 Persian rugs class and covers a standard living or dining space with the borders still visible past the furniture. The pile is wool at a clipped 3/8", short enough that every outline in the medallion stays sharp, worked over a hand-spun cotton foundation. Condition is excellent, with even pile across the field and clean, intact ivory end finishes as shown in the photographs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the textbook medallion and corner scheme, but the drawing inside it is unusually busy for the type. The centre is a circular medallion built in concentric rings: an 8 petal rosette at the core surrounded by curling split-leaf scrolls, then a ring of oval navy and teal cartouches, each one holding its own small flower head, and an outer halo of ivory and soft yellow palmettes. Slender ivory pendants rise from the top and bottom, finishing in small shield-shaped cartouches. The 4 corner spandrels are cut as broad floral panels on ivory, each one filled with roses, rounded blossoms, dark leaves and the same oval medallion elements repeated at a smaller scale, so the corners answer the centre rather than simply framing it. Thin yellow cloud-band hooks float along the inner edge of the field. The main border is ivory, drawn with alternating palmettes and blossom clusters on a continuous vine, and it is held between green guard stripes carrying a running rosette and leaf meander, with narrow rose-red reciprocal stripes separating each band.

Colors: Deep Red, Ivory and Teal-Green

The field is a deep red that leans raspberry where the light rakes across the pile, a tone with real depth to it rather than a flat brick, which is why this piece belongs with the better red and burgundy Persian rugs. Against it the ivory reads almost white in the spandrels and main border, cooling the whole composition and giving the flowers room to breathe. The third colour does most of the work: a clear teal-green that fills the heart of the medallion and runs through both guard borders, picked up again in the dark bottle green of the leaves. Smaller accents fill in the detail, soft rose and salmon pink in the roses and rosettes, navy in the oval cartouches and flower centres, straw yellow in the scrolling hooks and palmette outlines, with touches of mustard and olive in the border blossoms. The close-up of the medallion shows how many of these shades are stacked within a few inches of weaving, and the combination of red, ivory and green keeps the rug formal without turning dark.

Origin: Woven in the Tabriz Tradition in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and technical centre of Persian weaving for centuries, with the surrounding district, including the town of Khoy, weaving to the same standards and using the same Raj system of counting knots across the width. The signatures of that workshop training are all over this piece: a cotton warp pulled tight enough to keep the medallion perfectly round, a short clipped pile that holds a curved line without blurring, and a drawing executed from a scale cartoon so the 4 spandrels match each other motif for motif. Tabriz weavers use a hook-ended knife that lets them work quickly at fine counts, which is part of why room size Tabriz rugs are so consistently well built, and the regional wool takes dye deeply and wears hard. At 8'11" x 12'5" this is a large piece of that tradition, woven entirely by hand, knot by knot, with the structural soundness that makes a Tabriz a rug you place once and keep for decades.