8'6" x 11'11" Persian Kashan Rug | Signed Red Field with Navy Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is a signed room-size Kashan, 8'6" x 11'11" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, and it reads exactly the way a good workshop piece from central Persia should: a deep red field carrying an unbroken floral vine, a navy lobed medallion drawn dead center, and a small woven cartouche set into the border where the weaver put his name. The pile is a full 3/8" and even from end to end, the sides and fringes are original and intact, and the drawing holds its symmetry across all 4 corners. Buyers who want the background on the town and its workshops can read our guide to Persian Kashan rugs before deciding. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The composition is the classic Kashan formula, executed with more detail than most examples at this size. A navy lobed medallion sits at the center, and inside it a light blue 8 petal rosette floats on an ivory cusped ground, ringed by small red and rose blossoms. Slender pendants rise and fall from the medallion on the long axis, each finished with a hooked finial. The red field around it is filled with a continuous vine that never repeats lazily: palmettes, rosettes, curling serrated leaves and tiny bud clusters spiral outward in mirrored pairs, so the eye reads movement rather than a stamped grid. Navy spandrels close the 4 corners with matching ivory cusps and their own floral sprays, framing the field like a cartouche. The border system runs 5 bands deep, with a wide navy main border of alternating palmettes and rosettes joined by a brown and ivory meandering vine, flanked by light blue guard stripes of scrolling blossoms and outer red reciprocal edging. Set into that border is the signature cartouche shown in the close-up, woven in pale green, ivory and red with Persian script, the mark of a named weaver rather than an anonymous commercial run.

The Color Palette, Read Up Close

The field is a true tomato red with a slight cherry depth, clear rather than brick, and the wool takes light well enough that the tone shifts a shade lighter where the pile leans away from you. Against it, the medallion, spandrels and main border are a very dark indigo navy that reads almost black in low light and opens up to blue in daylight, giving the design its hard contrast. The mid tones do the real work: soft light blue in the medallion core, the guard stripes and hundreds of small blossoms, warm ivory and cream in the cusped outlines and the vine tracery, and a muted sage to olive green through the leaves and the signature panel. Rose pink appears in the smaller flower heads and in the delicate outer guard band, warming the whole scheme, and touches of camel brown and mustard gold run through the border vine and the cartouche lettering. Nothing here is harsh or synthetic looking. The palette is the reason a red Kashan works in rooms people expect it not to: the navy grounds it, the ivory lifts it, and the green and pink keep the red from going flat.

Kashan: The Town and the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia north of Isfahan and has been weaving since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century, which is why the town's formula, red field, navy lobed medallion, ivory spandrels, is the image most people picture when they hear the words Persian rug. When you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. The local wool is soft and lustrous, which is what gives this pile its sheen and its resilience underfoot, and the cotton foundation keeps a rug this size flat and square, as the back photograph shows with its tight, regular knot rows. This one is a workshop piece rather than village work: the curved line of the vine, the balance of the pendants and the fact that the weaver signed the border all point to a shop that expected the rug to be judged closely. At 8'6" x 11'11" it settles into the standard 9x12 Persian rug footprint, the size most often specified for a full seating group or a long formal table, and it is offered here in excellent condition with full pile throughout.