9'10" x 12'10" Persian Tabriz Rug | Red & Blue Medallion Design | Woven Signature

This is a full room size Persian Tabriz at 9'10" x 12'10", hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands up crisply across the whole field. The drawing is the classic northwest Persian formula done properly: a deep red ground, an ivory scalloped medallion at center, sky blue quarter medallions holding the 4 corners, and a navy main border of linked palmette rosettes. A small woven signature cartouche sits in the lower border, the mark of a named workshop rather than an anonymous village loom, though the script is too fine to read off a photograph. It arrives in excellent condition with even pile and clean, straight sides, and ships with a certificate of authenticity. Buyers working within a fixed footprint can browse comparable 10x13 Persian rugs to see how this one sits in the group.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is an ivory lobed rosette divided into small lattice compartments, each one filled with tiny blossoms, with a navy 4 petal floret and a red core at the very middle. Above and below it run slender ivory pendants ending in stylized finials, and beyond those sit red and ivory anchor palmettes that pull the eye out along the long axis. The red field around the medallion is not open ground: it is packed with a fine scrolling vine, small starburst rosettes, and pictorial touches including narrow ewers, cypress and weeping willow sprays, and small vases with birds perched at the rim. The sky blue spandrels repeat the same vocabulary in reverse, blue ground with red and ivory flowerheads, and are stepped along their inner edge so the corners read as quarter medallions rather than plain fillers. The navy main border alternates large light blue and red palmette rosettes joined by a serpentine vine, framed on both sides by ivory guard stripes of running leaf and blossom.

A Red Field Framed in Sky Blue and Navy

The dominant color is a clear true red, warm rather than brick, and it holds the entire center of the rug. Against it the two blues do the structural work: a bright sky blue, almost cerulean, in the 4 spandrels and in the outer band of field, and a dark inky navy in the main border and in the heart of the medallion. That jump from light blue to navy is what gives the rug its depth from across a room. Ivory carries the medallion, the pendants and the guard stripes, keeping the whole composition from going heavy, and the drawing is finished with small quantities of soft green, old gold, salmon pink and dark brown in the individual flowerheads and leaves. The palette is high contrast but not loud, and the red and blue combination sits comfortably with dark wood, brass and warm neutral walls.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in East Azerbaijan in the far northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and artistic center of Persian weaving for centuries, the city that kept the court medallion tradition alive and exported it to the rest of the world. Tabriz looms are worked with a hook and the Turkish knot, and the city measures its own fineness in Raj, the count of knots across roughly 2.75 inches of width, with 40 Raj commercial work at one end and 70 Raj workshop weaving at the top. This piece belongs to the solid workshop tier rather than the silk-and-cartoon extreme: the knotting is tight enough to carry curved vine, fine lattice fills inside the medallion and legible birds and ewers at small scale, which is the real test of a Tabriz drawing. The back is even, the selvedges are firm, and the wool has the dry springy handle that keeps a Tabriz flat and upright under furniture for decades.