8'8" x 12'6" Persian Kashan Rug | Navy Floral Medallion | Signed Cartouche

A signed piece is always the one you look at twice, and this 8'8" x 12'6" rug carries its cartouche woven right into the upper border, where the weaver put his name in Persian script against an ivory ground. The rug is hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a fine, tightly clipped wool pile, and the back shows the even, disciplined rows that separate town workshop weaving from village work. Classic Persian Kashan rugs are built exactly this way: a lobed medallion floating on a densely drawn floral field, framed by a wide red border of meandering vine. Condition is excellent, with full even pile from end to end and no repairs or wear areas to declare. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, size and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a red lobed medallion with stepped, bracketed edges, and inside it an ivory cartouche cradles a pale blue 8 petal rosette drawn with real precision. Pendant finials reach out along the long axis, and the same medallion vocabulary repeats in the 4 corner spandrels, so the layout reads as a single balanced composition rather than a field with a shape dropped on it. Between medallion and corners the navy field is filled with a continuous system of curling vines, palmettes, cupped rosettes, small blossoms and serrated leaves, drawn small enough that the pattern stays fine at this scale. The main red border runs a scrolling vine with alternating palmettes and rosettes, flanked by a light blue guard stripe on each side and then narrow ivory and red reciprocal stripes that close the frame. The signed cartouche interrupts the border at the top, the traditional place for a workshop mark.

Colors in This Rug

The field is a deep indigo navy that reads close to black in low light and opens into true blue where daylight hits the pile, which makes it one of the more forgiving navy blue Persian rugs to place in a bright room. Against that ground the medallion and border carry a warm brick red with an oxblood depth in the border corners, and the drawing is picked out in ivory and soft cream, cornflower and powder blue, muted sage and olive green, dusty rose, a little pale gold and small touches of camel brown. The lighter blues do a lot of the work, lifting the blossoms clear of the dark field so the vinework stays legible across the whole 12'6" length. Light blue guard stripes on both sides of the red border give the frame a cool outline, and the ivory reciprocal stripes at the outer edge keep the red from running straight into the floor.

Kashan Origin and Weaving Quality

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms inherited the Safavid court workshop tradition along with unusually soft, lustrous local wool. That combination produced the formula the whole market now recognizes: a lobed medallion, ivory spandrels and a wide vine border, worked at a knot count fine enough to hold curved line. When you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor, which tells you how completely this town defined what people picture when they picture a Persian rug. A woven signature means the piece came off a named workshop loom rather than a commercial run, and the back of this rug supports that, with straight, closely packed rows of knots on a cotton warp and weft and a pile clipped low so the drawing stays crisp. The wool has kept its sheen and the colors have settled without fading, which is what you want to see in an estate Kashan of this size.