8'4" x 12'5" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory All-Over Floral Field | Excellent Condition

This is a room-size Tabriz with no medallion at all, which is the harder way to draw a rug: nothing anchors the eye, so the vinework itself has to hold the whole 8'4" x 12'5" field together, and here it does. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation, cropped at a medium height that keeps the drawing legible, and the handle is firm and flat without being stiff. Condition is excellent across the board, with full pile edge to edge, straight sides and original ends. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over floral system built on mirrored axes: slender vines sweep out from a central spine and double back on themselves, carrying split palmettes, lotus heads, carnations and small 8 petal rosettes along the way. Large serrated acanthus leaves in deep burgundy and brown cut diagonally across the ivory ground and give the pattern its rhythm, while tiny five-petal blossoms fill the open spaces so no area of the field reads as empty. The main border runs on a pale ground with alternating boteh-like palmette cartouches and upright tulip groups, each one outlined in indigo, and it is framed on both sides by narrow guard stripes of running vine and reciprocal trefoils. Look at the corner photographs and you can see the corners resolve cleanly, which is the mark of a cartoon that was drawn properly rather than improvised at the end.

Ivory Ground with Blue, Red and Green

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached wool than to white, and it is what makes this one of those ivory Persian rugs that lifts a dark room instead of fighting it. The blues run the full range, from a soft sky blue in the rosette centers up through cornflower and into a deep indigo used for outlines and for the narrow framing stripes. Reds move from a clear cherry in the small flowerheads to brick and then to a near-aubergine burgundy in the big leaves. Green appears as a quiet sage and olive in the foliage rather than as a loud accent, and there are touches of camel and soft gold in the border cartouches along with occasional pale rose and lilac. The overall effect is light and polychrome, cool in tone from a distance and surprisingly rich up close.

Tabriz Weaving and Build Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's workshop city for centuries, the place where professional designers draw cartoons and weavers execute them on a cotton warp and weft using the Raj system to measure fineness. That workshop discipline is why a Tabriz of this size stays square and flat: the weft is beaten evenly, the knotting is consistent from one end of 12'5" to the other, and the drawing does not drift. The wool is tightly packed and has the slight sheen that comes from a good fleece, so the pile takes light differently as you walk around it. At 8 feet by over 12 feet this belongs with the large Persian rugs that are meant to carry a full seating group or a 10 seat table with the chairs pulled out, and it is built heavily enough to do that for generations.