9'10" x 12'9" Persian Mashad Rug | Red Floral Medallion Field | Semi-Antique, Excellent Condition

This is a room size Mashad in the classic eastern Persian idiom: a deep red field carrying a single lobed medallion, four indigo corner spandrels, and a wide indigo main border framed by ivory guard stripes. At 9'10" x 12'9" it covers a standard formal room wall to wall with the border reading cleanly all the way around, and the 3/8" wool pile has worn down evenly rather than thinning in traffic lanes, which is exactly what you want to see in an older piece. The handle is supple, the ends and selvedges are sound, and the cotton fringe is original and intact. Collectors tend to buy Persian Mashad rugs for exactly this combination of soft Khorasan wool and drawing that stays curvilinear at a usable knot count. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a small salmon cartouche with a 4 lobe blossom at its heart, set inside a slate indigo lobed medallion whose arms curl out into pale scrolling tendrils and 4 large coiled spirals. Around it the red field is filled edge to edge with an all over arrangement of serrated leaves, pendant palmettes, split arabesque vine and clusters of 8 petal rosettes, with tiny ivory and blue flower sprays scattered between the larger forms so there is no dead ground anywhere. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the medallion palette in indigo and carry heavy curled palmettes and boteh forms, which gives the field a clearly defined open-cornered frame. The main border is a wide indigo band of alternating shield palmettes and lanceolate leaves on a continuous stem, flanked inside and out by ivory guard borders of linked rosettes and by a narrow reciprocal sawtooth stripe. The drawing is village workshop work rather than a drafted master cartoon, so small asymmetries appear between opposite ends of the field, and that is part of the character of a hand-drawn Mashad.

Color Palette

The field is a deep madder red with a faint cool, almost raspberry cast where the light catches the pile, and it carries a gentle abrash that shifts a shade lighter toward the center. Against it the medallion and spandrels read as a dark, dusty indigo that softens to slate blue where the pile has polished, with the medallion core picked out in a warm salmon peach that is the single brightest note in the rug. The vine work and leaves run through sage green, soft teal, mid blue and a muted olive brown, while the flower heads are drawn in ivory, rose pink and pale cream. The outer guard borders are a creamy ivory to light gold that lifts the whole composition and keeps the dark main border from closing the rug in, and small charcoal to near black accents inside the border palmettes sharpen their outlines. The selvedge is wrapped in the same red as the field and the fringe is natural undyed cotton. In practice the rug sits comfortably with warm woods, brass and leather, and the ivory border gives it a route into rooms with cream walls and upholstery.

Mashad Origin and Weaving Quality

Mashad is the capital of Khorasan in northeastern Persia and the country's great pilgrimage city, and its looms have supplied large room size and palace format rugs for well over a century. Khorasan wool is long stapled and takes a high polish as it ages, which is why older Mashad pieces develop the soft sheen you see across this field rather than going dry. The weave here is a single wefted Persian knot on a cotton foundation, moderately dense and very regular, as the reverse photograph shows: tight rows with the pattern legible from the back. That build is what makes a rug of this format practical, heavy enough to lie flat without curling, strong enough to live under a dining table or a sofa for decades. If you are working to a room plan rather than a specific weaving town, this piece sits in the same bracket as our other 10x13 Persian rugs, but the Khorasan wool and the hand-drawn medallion are what separate it from the pack.