8'2" x 11'6" Persian Nain Rug | Navy Blue Wool & Silk Medallion | 2000s Perfect Condition

Most Nains come to market on an ivory ground, which is exactly why this one stops people: the field here is deep navy, and the ivory has been saved for the medallion, the spandrels and the wide outer border. It measures 8'2" x 11'6", was woven in the 2000s on a cotton foundation in wool with silk drawn through the outlines, and the pile is full and even from selvage to selvage with the original hand-tied fringe intact at both ends. Among Persian Nain rugs this is the color reversal collectors ask for and rarely find in a room-filling size. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a stepped ivory medallion built around an 8 petal rosette, layered outward through fine blue tracery into lanceolate leaves and small paisley forms, then finished with a pendant at each end. Around it the navy field runs as a continuous arabesque: scrolling vines that curl back on themselves, Shah Abbasi palmettes, half palmettes and tiny buds, all drawn in the curvilinear manner and all outlined so the line stays crisp against the dark ground. Four ivory spandrels close the corners with the same vocabulary at a smaller scale. The main border is ivory with an undulating vine and alternating rosettes, flanked by a camel guard stripe and a pale blue minor band on either side, and the corner detail photo shows the border turns resolving cleanly, which is the mark of a drawn cartoon followed properly rather than a pattern improvised at the ends.

Navy Blue and Ivory, and Everything Between Them

The field is a true midnight navy, dark enough to read almost black in low light and to sit quietly under furniture, but it opens up under a lamp and the vinework separates immediately. The ivory is a warm cream rather than a cold white, closer to old paper, and it carries the medallion, the spandrels and the main border. Between those two poles sit the accents that give the rug its depth: a soft sky blue used for leaves and secondary flowers, a pale camel that warms the guard stripes and part of the border ground, and occasional touches of wine red and olive in the flower heads. The silk shows itself where the highlights catch light at an angle, brighter than the wool around it, particularly in the medallion tracery and along the outlines of the palmettes. Practically, a navy field of this size hides traffic and forgives a household in a way an all-ivory Nain will not.

Nain: The Town and the Weave

Nain sits on the western edge of the central Persian desert, a short drive from Isfahan, and its weaving is young by Persian standards: the town made fine wool cloth until that trade faded, then turned its spinners and its Isfahan-trained draftsmen to rugs in the 20th century. That history explains the character of the piece in front of you, a desert town working to a city drawing standard, with tight cotton warps, short clipped wool and silk used as an outlining thread rather than as a whole pile. Fineness in Nain is described by La, the number of plies in the weft yarn, and the lower the count the finer the rug, which is the logic behind Nain 6La and Habibian weaving. Here the drawing holds detail at the scale of a single bud across nearly 12 feet of length, which no coarse weave can do, and the back shown against the ruler confirms a small, regular knot laid in even rows.