9'10" x 12'11" Persian Kashmar Rug | Pictorial Garden and Palace Panels | Signed Cartouche

This is a picture rug before it is a floor covering, and it rewards the time you spend in front of it. Across a field that measures 9'10" x 12'11", the weaver has laid out a walled garden seen from above: a domed pavilion at the head of the rug flanked by rows of slim columns, terraces stepping down to a river with swans on it, orchards, deer, peacocks, seated figures under arcades, and a pair of lions guarding the lower panels. The pile is hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, with enough knots per square inch to hold faces, roof tiles and individual birds without the drawing going soft. A woven cartouche in the inner border carries the weaver's signature in Persian script, the mark of a workshop piece rather than a village copy. It arrives in excellent condition with a certificate of authenticity from Rugs.net, our own guarantee that the rug is genuinely hand-knotted in Persia as described. It sits comfortably in the family of 10x13 Persian rugs that anchor a full seating group.

Design and Motifs

The composition is built in horizontal registers rather than around a single medallion. At the top a colonnaded palace with a tiled dome rises behind a flight of steps, framed by cypress and blossoming trees. Below it, arched panels hold urns and slender vases, and a pair of confronted peacocks flanks a patterned jar on an ivory ground. The center of the rug is a dark indigo cluster of foliage crowned by a scalloped river scene: two swans on rippled blue water, twin cypresses, village houses with pitched roofs on either bank. Two circular roundels sit left and right of the lower stem, each one holding birds and flowering branches on navy. Along the base, a second pavilion is flanked by two terracotta arches with blue and white vases, and small lions crouch in the outer corners. The main border runs crimson with a continuous vine and reserved ivory cartouches, and the outermost band is a quiet salmon guard sprinkled with tiny scrolling leaves, which keeps all that narrative detail from spilling past the edge. The 4 corners are resolved cleanly, a sign the cartoon was properly drawn before the first knot was tied.

A Multi Color Palette Built on Salmon and Crimson

The outer frame is a warm salmon, close to camel with a pink cast, and it is the color that sets the temperature of the whole piece. Inside it the main border turns deep crimson red, and that red repeats through the field in the arched panels and the feathered palmettes, tying top to bottom. Against those warm tones the weaver has set a soft sky blue that fills the terraces, the river and the arcaded galleries, plus a saturated navy indigo in the central foliage and the two roundels for depth. Ivory does the work of light, opening up the vase panels and the cartouches so the eye has somewhere to rest. Accents run through terracotta orange in the lower arches, teal and pine green in the trees, soft rose in the small blossoms, and shades of taupe and brown in the animals and architecture. This is a true multi color rug in the collector sense, with dozens of shades used deliberately rather than a handful stretched thin, which is why it reads warm from across the room and complex up close. Browse more multi colored Persian rugs if this palette is the direction you are working in.

Kashmar and the Khorasan Weaving Tradition

Kashmar is a town in Khorasan, in the northeast of Persia, and it built its name in the 20th century on exactly this kind of work: large pictorial and garden compositions, architectural scenes drawn from Persian history and poetry, and grounds in camel, salmon and soft red. The region's wool is long stapled and takes dye cleanly, which is why the blues and reds here still have life in them, and the pile is dense enough to give the drawing crisp edges rather than blurred outlines. Kashmar weaving is traded within the wider Khorasan group alongside Persian Mashad rugs, the provincial capital an hour or so to the northeast, and the two share the same cotton foundation and asymmetric knot. A signed cartouche on a pictorial of this scale means a workshop master oversaw the cartoon and the dye lots from the first row to the last, which is the difference between a rug that merely depicts a garden and one that is worth hanging on a wall.