8' x 11'4" Persian Tabriz Rug | Navy Blue Field with Red Diamond Medallion | 1980s

This is a 1980s Persian Tabriz in the classic town idiom: a deep navy blue field, a red diamond medallion with a teal heart, and broad ivory corners that lift the whole drawing. The wool is fine and tightly packed over a cotton foundation, the 3/8" pile stands up evenly from end to end, and the selvages and both ends are intact, which is why the condition reads as perfect. At 8' x 11'4" it sits in the most useful of all room sizes, and buyers comparing 8x11 Persian rugs will recognise this as a piece that covers a seating group without crowding it. If you want to understand how a weave, a palette and a back like this one point to a decade, our guide to dating an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, age and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a single large diamond medallion set in a diamond-shaped reserve, with a stepped red frame, an ivory outline dotted like a string of beads, and a teal cross-shaped core holding small brown and ivory cartouches at the 4 points. Red pendants reach out above and below the medallion toward the 2 ends. The navy field around it is packed with small stylized matter rather than open space: 8 petal rosettes with green centres, light blue star rosettes, little flowering vases, comb and bracket figures, single tulips and scattered birds and four-footed animals, all drawn in the angular, straight-line manner of the Tabriz tradition. The 4 corner spandrels are ivory and carry curling vines, rosettes and more small animal and bird figures. A wide madder red main border runs blue palmettes alternating with upright boteh leaves and green rosette clusters, framed by pale green guard stripes of tiny flowerheads and thin blue and yellow reciprocal lines.

A Royal Navy Blue Field Against Madder Red and Ivory

The dominant colour is a saturated royal navy blue, dark enough to read as a quiet ground but with real depth in the wool when the light crosses it, which is what gives this piece its place among navy and blue Persian rugs. Against it the weaver set a warm madder red for the medallion reserve and the main border, a clean ivory for the spandrels, the medallion outline and the guard stripes, and a strong teal blue at the very centre. The supporting palette is where the rug earns its personality: leaf green and a softer sage in the rosettes and guard stripes, clear yellow and gold in the border leaves and field brackets, powder blue in the star rosettes and palmettes, dark chocolate brown in the medallion cartouches, and small touches of salmon and peach pink in the flowerheads. Nothing is muddy and nothing has run, so the blue, red, ivory and green still separate cleanly at a distance.

Woven in Tabriz, Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the town that supplied cartoons and trained weavers for much of the surrounding region. Tabriz looms are measured in Raj, the count of knots per gereh of about 2.75 in across the width, and the workshops there built their reputation on holding a straight, disciplined line at every grade from everyday 40 Raj work up to the 60 and 70 Raj collector pieces. This rug belongs to the sturdy, hard-wearing end of that tradition: a cotton foundation beaten down tight, a short 3/8" fine wool pile that keeps the small motifs legible, and the firm handle you can see in the back photograph, where the knot rows sit in even, straight courses. That construction is why a 1980s Tabriz like this one can still be sold in perfect condition and be expected to give another generation of daily use.