8' x 11' Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool | Red and Ivory

A hand-knotted Tabriz from Persia, 8' x 11', with a wool pile and a cotton-white fringe at both ends. The field is a deep red, nearly wine where the pile lies away from the light, carrying a stepped ivory medallion at the centre and a wide dusty rose border that frames the whole thing. It is a rectangular rug in perfect condition, the pile even from end to end.

Design

The centre holds a stepped, many-lobed medallion in ivory with a navy inner cartouche and a small red rosette at its heart, the sort of geometry that reads as drawn on graph paper rather than sketched freehand. Pendants finish it top and bottom. The field around it is packed with small palmettes, serrated leaves, cypress-like sprigs and rows of stacked blossoms, each one outlined so it stands clear of the red ground. The corner spandrels repeat the ivory in large angular quarters, each filled with its own rosettes and hooked devices. Outside those runs the main border of scrolling palmettes and split leaves, flanked by two narrower guard bands of linked flowerheads on cream and a fine dark reciprocal edge.

Colour

The ground is a deep madder red that tips towards burgundy in the overhead shots and warms up closer to brick under direct light. Against it the ivory and beige of the medallion and corners does most of the work of lifting the drawing. The main border sits in a soft dusty rose, cooler and lighter than the field, so the boundary between them is unmistakable from across a room. Accents run through the small motifs: bottle and sea green in the leaves, navy and light blue in the palmette centres, rust in one corner cartouche, tobacco brown in the stems, and near-black outlining where a motif needs a hard edge.

Making

Knotted by hand in Persia and dated by the table to the 1980s, which places it in the semi-antique bracket rather than among new goods. The pile is wool throughout, cut low enough that the fine detail in the border and the small field motifs stays legible, as the close photographs of the back and the rolled edge show. Condition is given as perfect, and the fringes and selvedges in the photographs are intact. It sits alongside the rest of our hand-knotted stock as a full-size room rug rather than an accent piece.