8'2" x 11'4" Persian Kashan Rug | Red Field Floral Medallion | Signed Cartouche

This is the piece most people picture when they think of a formal Persian rug: a deep red field, a navy lobed medallion with an ivory heart, and flowering vinework drawn corner to corner without a lazy inch anywhere. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile, and the weaver signed the work in a small cartouche set into the upper guard border, which on a piece of this scale means a named workshop stood behind it. At 8'2" x 11'4" it sits squarely in the most useful of all 8 x 11 Persian rugs, large enough to carry a full seating group yet still manageable in a standard dining room. Among Persian Kashan rugs this one is in genuinely excellent order, with even pile, straight sides and clean original ends. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Kashan formula, executed with more detail than most. A navy lobed medallion sits dead center, stepped and cusped around an ivory cartouche that holds a light blue 8 petal rosette at its core. Slim pendants drop above and below it, each finishing in a small palmette. The 4 corners carry navy spandrels drawn as mirror quarters of the medallion, so the eye reads the center and the corners as one continuous idea. Between them the red field is filled with an all over lattice of curling vines, serrated saz leaves, rosettes and small blossoms, no two clusters repeating in an obvious way. The border system runs 3 bands deep: a wide navy main border of alternating palmettes and rosettes joined by arabesque vine, flanked by light blue guard stripes of reciprocating leaf and blossom. The signature cartouche is woven into the upper guard stripe in green, ivory and red, framed by rosettes, exactly where a Kashan master signs.

A Red Field With Navy, Ivory and Light Blue Detail

The ground is a true crimson red, clear and saturated rather than brick or rust, and it holds its tone evenly across the whole field. Against it the medallion, spandrels and main border are a very dark navy that reads nearly black in low light and opens up to indigo in daylight. The third color doing the real work is light blue: it fills the guard stripes, outlines dozens of the small rosettes, and lights the center of the medallion, which keeps the palette from going heavy. Ivory appears in the medallion heart, in the fine outlining of every vine, and along the guard bands, drawing the design cleanly away from the red. Scattered through the field are soft rose and salmon pinks, a warm gold used sparingly on flower centers, olive green in the leaves and a few touches of brown. The fringe and selvedges are natural ivory.

Kashan: Central Persia's Court Weaving Town

Kashan lies in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops that produced some of the most famous medallion rugs in existence. The town's local wool is soft and unusually lustrous, which is why a Kashan picks up light and shifts tone as you walk around it. The weave here is tight and regular, as the back photograph shows, with small even knots on a cotton foundation and a low 3/8" pile that keeps the curved drawing crisp. It is also the single most recognizable Persian design in America: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. That familiarity is not accident but function, since this red and navy medallion format has anchored formal rooms for over a century and still does the job better than anything modern.