8'3" x 12' Persian Tabriz Rug | All Over Floral | Wool & Silk on Silk Foundation

This 8'3" x 12' rug is a workshop piece from the Tabriz group, hand-knotted in wool with silk highlights over a silk foundation and woven in the 2000's. The silk warps let the weaver draw curved lines that hold their shape at a small scale, which is why the flowers across the ivory field stay round and the vine stays continuous instead of breaking into steps. In the raking light of the floor photographs the silk passages catch and release as you walk around it, so the same rug reads warmer from one end and cooler from the other. It arrives in perfect condition with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion. This is a true all over floral design, built on a lattice of thin brown vines that split, curl back and reconnect across the full 12' length. Hung from that lattice are open palmettes, 8 and 12 petal rosettes, cusped leaves and small lanceolate sprays, each drawn with an outline of one or two knots so the shapes stay crisp against the open ground. The composition mirrors on both the long and short axis, so the 4 corners resolve cleanly rather than cutting a flower in half. Framing the field are 5 bands: a broad main border of boteh and turning palmettes on tan, flanked by narrow floral guard stripes and a fine reciprocal tan and green outer edge, visible clearly in the corner photograph.

Ivory, Tan, Blue and Green Color Palette

The field is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to stark white, and it occupies most of the surface, which is what makes this rug read as light in a room. The main border steps up half a tone into tan, giving definition without introducing a hard frame. Everything else is accent work: soft powder blue and deeper navy in the flower centers, olive and sage green in the leaves and in one guard stripe, and touches of rose, salmon and dark burgundy that appear in the petals and in the fine vine outlines. Nothing here shouts. At a distance the rug settles into a pale neutral, and only up close, as in the detail photograph, do the blues and greens separate out into individual blossoms.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving center for centuries, working from drawn cartoons rather than memory, which is why its floral rugs are so precisely resolved. The workshops there measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in, and only a high count will carry drawing this small. On a silk foundation the warps sit closer together than cotton allows, so the knot nodes are tighter and the pile can be clipped low, which is exactly what the back photograph shows. If you want to understand why weavers reach for silk in the structure as well as the pile, our Persian silk rugs guide covers it, and there is more context across our collection of Persian Tabriz rugs.