8'11" x 12'9" Persian Sarouk Rug | Sky Blue All-Over Floral Field | Signed Cartouche

A sky blue ground is unusual in Persian Sarouk rugs, which almost always run red or deep madder, and that single decision is what makes this piece worth stopping on. The drawing is pure Sarouk, a lobed medallion floating in an all-over garden of palmettes and curling vine, but the palette reads light and airy rather than heavy. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile, it carries a woven signature cartouche in the main border, and at 8'11" x 12'9" it covers a full room while still slotting into the footprint most buyers shop as 9x12 room size Persian rugs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

At the center sits a lobed medallion in burgundy, filled with an ivory rosette and ringed by small serrated leaves, with pointed pendants running off the top and bottom axis. Around it the field is worked as a continuous floral lattice rather than an empty ground: large palmettes, open rosettes, pomegranate buds, feathered leaves and thin tendrils that loop between the blossoms. Each of the 4 corners carries a tall shield-shaped cartouche in ivory and slate, a Sarouk device that anchors the composition without turning into a hard spandrel. The main border is an ivory band of scrolling vine linking alternating palmettes and cupped flowerheads, flanked by red guard stripes and a narrow olive minor border, and the signature cartouche interrupts the red stripe at one end in a small ivory oval, the mark of a workshop weaver rather than an anonymous village loom.

A Sky Blue Field Framed in Ivory

The ground is a clear mid sky blue with a faint gray cast, softer than the navy that dominates most blue Persian rugs, and it shifts slightly with the nap from powder to a deeper cornflower as you walk around it. Against that field the flowers are drawn in rose pink, dusty coral, brick red and a muted olive green, with chocolate brown outlining the larger palmettes and giving them weight. The medallion supplies the one true burgundy note, echoed in the guard stripes so the eye travels from center to edge. The main border is a warm ivory, not a cold white, which keeps the blue from reading modern and ties the rug to cream walls, oak floors and walnut furniture. Close up the pile shows the natural abrash typical of small dye lots, a quiet variation in the blue that no machine loom reproduces.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a village in the Arak district of central Persia, and its looms built their reputation on two things: a heavy, tightly packed knot on a stout cotton foundation, and curvilinear floral drawing borrowed from the old court workshops rather than the angular geometry of tribal weaving. That combination produces a rug that looks formal but wears like a workhorse, which is why Sarouks have been the default American room size rug for a century. The back of this piece, shown against the ruler, is crisp and even with the knot nodes clearly defined and the design fully legible from the reverse, the sign of consistent tension and careful beating down. The 3/8" pile is dense enough to stand up under furniture legs, the selvages and fringes are intact, and the condition is excellent with even pile across the full 12'9" length.