9'10" x 12'10" Persian Kashmar Rug | Signed Cartouche | Red Field with Navy Floral Border

This is a signed Persian Kashmar, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and woven in Kashmar, a town in Khorasan that works squarely within the Persian Mashad weaving tradition. At 9'10" x 12'10" it belongs to the most useful of all formats, the room-filling 10x13 Persian rugs that cover a large seating area wall to wall without crowding it. The weaver signed his work in a small ivory cartouche set into the light blue guard border, which is the mark of a workshop piece rather than an anonymous commercial run. The pile is full and even across all 4 corners, the selvages are intact and the rug has never been used. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic central medallion formula, but the field is worked far busier than most. A lobed ivory and camel medallion sits at the center, filled with a small rosette at its heart and ringed by pointed leaves and rose palmettes, and it floats on a navy ground that spreads outward in a second, larger lobed halo. Slender navy pendants run north and south from the medallion to the ends of the field, and matching navy spandrels close off all 4 corners. Everything between is covered edge to edge with an allover floral repeat: multi petal rosettes, split palmettes, serrated leaves, curling vine scrolls and tiny flowering sprays, each outlined so the pattern reads clearly even from standing height. The main border carries a navy ground with alternating rosettes and leafy vines, flanked by light blue guard stripes of small blossoms, and a narrow ivory reciprocating band sits between them. The signature cartouche interrupts the blue guard band at the top of the rug.

The Color Palette: Raspberry Red, Indigo and Sky Blue

The field is a saturated raspberry red, warm but with enough blue in it to stay away from orange, and it is the color that carries the whole rug. Against it the navy is close to indigo, deep and almost black in the shadows of the border and the medallion surround, which is what gives the ivory drawing its contrast. Between those two heavyweights sits the color that makes this Kashmar unusual: a soft cornflower sky blue in the guard borders and scattered through the field flowers, lighter and chalkier than the navy and rare in this much quantity. Ivory and cream do the outlining work everywhere, rose pink and soft coral fill the larger blossoms, and olive green appears in the leaves and in the small cross motifs of the reciprocating band. Camel and tan warm the medallion and the corner spandrels, with a few touches of teal and mustard in the border flowers. It is a red rug at first glance and a genuinely multi colored one on closer inspection.

Kashmar and the Khorasan Weaving Tradition

Kashmar lies in Khorasan, the northeastern province of Persia whose weaving capital is Mashad, and pieces from the town are sold within that group. Khorasan wool takes dye deeply and keeps a soft handle underfoot, and Kashmar workshops built their reputation on large room-size formats like this one, drawn with the curved floral vocabulary of the city ateliers rather than the angular geometry of village work. The weave here is tight and regular, the knots sit in clean rows on the back, and the outlines hold their shape through the fine vine scrolls, which is what separates a workshop Kashmar from the looser commercial weaves that borrow the same design. If you are comparing it with other Persian Mashad rugs, look at the signature and the sky blue guard border: both point to a named weaver working to his own standard rather than to a market order.