8'2" x 12'1" Persian Tabriz Rug | Signed Paradise Birds & Animals Design | Dark Indigo Field

A signed piece is a workshop piece, and this 8'2" x 12'1" Persian Tabriz rug carries its weaver's cartouche woven straight into the ivory ground of the upper border, exactly where a Tabriz atelier signs its work. The drawing is a paradise garden: flowering trees rising from a dark indigo field, deer and gazelle standing among them, and small birds set into the branches. It is a true room size piece and one of the more usable formats among large 8x12 Persian rugs, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands full and even across the field. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The centre holds a large red star medallion built from layered points, each one filled with its own small vase of blossoms and closed with a white rosette cartouche, and at the very core sits an ivory eight petal flower ringed in green and pale blue. Above and below the medallion are matching red pendants with crowned finials. What fills the space around them is the real story: tall flowering trees and cypress forms lean inward from both long sides, and among their branches the weaver set pairs of deer, a gazelle in mid stride, perched birds and long tailed birds in flight. The ivory spandrels at the 4 corners are drawn with curling split leaf vines and framed rosette panels, a deliberate contrast to the crowded field. The main border runs a red ground of palmettes, serrated leaves and small flower sprays, held between narrow guard stripes of blossom vine, so the frame stays busy without competing with the garden inside it.

Dark Indigo, Deep Red and Ivory

The field reads as a dark indigo, the deepest register of the navy blue Persian rug family, with a faint purple cast where the light catches the pile and a near black tone in the shadows. Against it the medallion and the wide border carry a warm brick red that has softened into a slightly rust toned tomato shade, the kind of red that comes from age rather than from a dye bath. The spandrels and the guard stripes are a mellow ivory that has gone toward cream and light tan. Inside those three main tones the weaver worked a genuinely wide palette: sage and bottle green in the leaves, sky blue and turquoise in the small blossoms and in the panel behind the signature, rose pink in the flower heads, saffron yellow in the vine tips, and white for the deer and the birds so the animals read clearly against the dark ground. The combination of an indigo centre and a red frame is classic and makes the rug sit comfortably with both wood tones and cooler modern paint colours.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz is the workshop capital of northwest Persia and the one weaving centre that never stopped producing at a professional level, which is why its rugs are measured in Raj, knots per gereh across the width, rather than by eye. That workshop discipline is visible here. The curved outline of the medallion holds its line all the way around, the animals are drawn small and still legible, and the two halves of the field mirror each other closely, which only happens when weavers work from a properly executed cartoon rather than from memory. The back photograph shows a tight, regular knot bed on a cotton foundation with the design coming through crisply, the mark of a rug woven for a named atelier rather than for the open market. Wool from this region is firm and slightly lustrous, and at 3/8" the pile here has kept its body across the full 8'2" x 12'1" surface with even colour from end to end.