8' x 8' Chinese Tabriz Rug | Silk | Red and Green

A silk rug of Width: 8' x Length: 8', hand-knotted in China in a Tabriz design. The footprint is square, but the four corners are cut back on the diagonal so that the finished rug sits as an octagon, fringed on all eight sides. At a glance it reads as one great domed medallion filling the whole field, red at the outside and cooling to green and gold at the centre, with the drawing fine enough that the pattern only resolves when you are standing over it. At this size the medallion covers almost the entire floor area.

The design

The centre is a many-pointed star rosette in ivory and rose, ringed by short teal and gold kite-shaped panels, then by a band of navy palmette cartouches. From there long red triangles radiate outward like the ribs of a dome, each one filled with its own small ivory flower head on a fine vine. Four curved spandrels close the corners of the inner field: two in sea green, two in dark indigo, each carrying a symmetrical arabesque of split leaves and blossoms. Outside them runs a wide navy border of linked octagonal cartouches in teal and ivory, framed by a red vine band and narrow reciprocal guard stripes. One guard band on the ivory outer edge carries a small woven signature cartouche, visible in the close photograph of the fringe.

The colour

The field ground is a dark rustic red with a blue cast in the pile, close to cochineal where the light strikes the silk and nearly black-red in the shadow between knots. Against it the greens do most of the work: a clear sea green in the two curved spandrels and the central kites, dropping to olive in the small leaves. The spandrels and the main border are indigo and navy, dark enough to hold the red apart from the teal, with a single bright blue stripe just inside the ivory edge. Gold and ivory carry the outlines throughout, and there is a warmer rust and apricot running through the star centre and the border cartouches. Rose pink appears only in the small flower heads.

The making

Hand-knotted with a silk pile on a fine weave, which is what lets the radiating triangles hold a straight edge across the whole diameter and the border cartouches stay square at that scale. Silk gives the surface its directional sheen: the same red looks light from one side of the rug and dark from the other, as the close photographs show. The rug was made in China to a Tabriz drawing rather than in Persia, and the ivory silk fringe is finished on all eight edges. The table records it as new and in perfect condition, with full pile throughout. More hand-knotted rugs are listed across the shop.