8'2" x 11'1" Vintage Persian Rug | Faded Red & Slate Blue Floral Medallion | 1950s, Low Even Pile

This is a genuine 1950s Persian room-size rug, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and measuring 8'2" x 11'1". Seventy years of living have taken the pile down low and evenly across the whole surface, which is exactly what collectors of worn Persian rugs look for: the drawing is still completely legible, the foundation is stable, the edges and ends are intact, and the colors have softened into the washed, almost painterly reds and blues you see in the photographs. Nothing here has been chemically overdyed or shaved to fake age. It is a long-used workshop piece that has earned its surface honestly, and at this size it sits squarely in the most useful proportion we sell, which is why we keep a dedicated run of 8x11 Persian rugs. Every rug we ship, including vintage pieces like this one, comes with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The composition is a classical Persian floral layout: an ivory and navy center medallion with a stepped, lobed outline, set in a field that is filled edge to edge with curling vine scroll, serrated leaves, palmettes and small 6 and 8 petal rosettes. Because the vinery never stops, the piece reads like an all-over floral rug with a medallion anchored in the middle of it, and the 4 corner spandrels repeat the same blossom vocabulary at a larger scale. The main border carries a continuous meander of palmettes and leaf scrolls flanked by narrow guard stripes, and the drawing stays curvilinear throughout, with flowing arcs rather than the straight-line geometry of village work. The low pile actually helps the pattern: with the wool worn close, the fine outline work around each blossom stands out like pen drawing, and the smaller motifs in the field are easier to read than they would be under a full pile.

A Faded Red Field Against Slate Blue

The field is a soft, dusty red, somewhere between raspberry and old brick, that has lost its original depth unevenly enough to give the surface a watercolor movement rather than a flat block of color. Around and through it run broad passages of slate blue and blue grey, strongest along the border and in the open sweeps that drift in from the sides, so the rug effectively reads as two colors trading places across the floor. The medallion and the smaller blossoms are picked out in ivory and cream, with deeper navy used for leaf outlines, the medallion core and the darker rosettes, and warm beige and pale camel appearing in the vine work and the smaller flower heads. Occasional touches of soft brown and olive turn up in the detail shots. The overall effect is low-contrast and muted, a red and blue antique palette that sits comfortably with grey, charcoal, walnut and natural linen instead of competing with them.

Persian Origin and Weaving Quality

This rug was woven in Persia in the 1950s, in the curvilinear floral tradition that the country's town workshops built their reputation on, and the back photograph tells you most of what you need to know about the hand behind it. The knotting is small, tight and remarkably regular, row after row, on a cotton warp and weft, with the design transferring cleanly to the reverse, the mark of a weaver following a drawn cartoon rather than improvising. That density is also why a rug with this much wear is still perfectly serviceable: a loosely woven piece worn this low would have begun to split, while this one remains stable and flat. The combination of structure, dye behavior and pattern drawing is exactly what a specialist examines when dating a piece, and if you want to understand the method we use, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through it step by step.