8' x 11'5" Persian Tabriz Rug | All Over Floral Field | Violet Blue, Red & Ivory

This is a full room-size Tabriz with no medallion at all, which is the harder way to draw a rug and the more interesting one to live with. The whole 8' x 11'5" field is given over to a repeating lattice of palmettes, serrated leaves and small rosettes on a deep violet blue ground, wrapped in a wide madder red border. The pile is 3/8" of dense wool over a cotton foundation, heavy enough to lie dead flat without slipping and firm enough to take real traffic. It sits squarely in the most usable band of 8x11 Persian rugs, big enough to hold a sofa group on all four legs without eating a standard room. Condition is perfect, with even pile, straight sides and intact hand-tied fringe at both ends. A certificate of authenticity is included with the rug.

Design and Motifs

The field runs on a diagonal repeat of stepped cartouches and hooked brackets, each cell holding an ivory palmette, a red diamond rosette or a pair of long serrated leaves that cross like blades. Small boteh, cypress sprigs and tiny 8 petal flowerheads fill the gaps, so the eye never lands on empty ground. It is a true all over rug, meaning furniture can sit anywhere on it without covering a centerpiece. The main border carries alternating star rosettes and radiating palmette bursts on red, separated by angular vine work, and is framed on both sides by ivory guard bands of pink and blue blossoms linked by green leaf stems. The corner resolutions are clean, a sign the weaver was working from a properly drawn cartoon rather than improvising to the edge.

A Violet Blue Field Framed in Madder Red

The ground is the interesting color here: not a flat navy but an indigo that leans distinctly violet purple, shifting toward cooler blue under daylight and deeper plum under lamplight. Against it the drawing is picked out in ivory and soft cream, with clear madder red, dusty rose, sage and bottle green, light sky blue and small touches of gold ochre. The wide border is a strong true red, cooler and cleaner than a brick tone, and the ivory guard stripes give the rug a bright outline that keeps the dark field from reading heavy. There is gentle abrash across the blue, the natural tonal variation of hand-dyed wool taken from different dye lots, which is exactly what separates a hand-knotted Persian rug from a printed reproduction.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the workhorse city of Persian weaving for centuries, producing everything from commercial 40 Raj goods to collector pieces at 70 Raj. Tabriz weavers work with a hook-ended knife and count fineness by Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in, and the discipline of that system shows in a rug like this one: straight selvedges, a field that stays square across 11'5" of length, and a repeat that does not drift. The wool is the tough, springy local fleece that gives Tabriz rugs their reputation for surviving decades of daily use, and the back photograph shows a tight, even knot with no slack lines. This is the kind of rug that gets handed down rather than replaced.