9'10" x 13'1" Persian Tabriz Rug | All-Over Floral Palmette Design | Ivory Border, Excellent Condition

This is a full room piece: 9'10" x 13'1" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, woven in the Tabriz tradition of northwest Persia and kept in excellent condition with an even 3/8" pile from end to end. Instead of the usual single medallion, the weaver filled the red field with a continuous all-over floral design, which is the harder layout to draw and the more forgiving one to live with, since furniture can sit anywhere without cutting off a centerpiece. Among 10x13 Persian rugs this one reads as a settled, formal floor rather than a decorative accent. A certificate of authenticity is issued with the rug and ships with it.

Design and Motifs

The field is a lattice of thin vine tracery carrying large round rosettes, fan-shaped palmettes, serrated split leaves and small curled boteh forms, repeated in mirrored pairs across the width so the eye keeps finding symmetry inside what first looks random. Between the big blossoms sit smaller 8 petal flowers, lotus heads and cloudband curls, and the drawing stays curvilinear throughout, with no break in the vine from one end to the other. The ivory main border runs a procession of broad palmettes and rosettes in brown, olive and blue, separated by leaf scrolls, and is bracketed by a pale blue inner band and several narrow guard stripes of tiny repeating florets. The border corners resolve cleanly, which is a drawing decision made on the loom and a fair test of the workshop that wove it.

The Color: Soft Red Held Inside Ivory

The ground is a warm red that has settled toward brick rather than staying scarlet, and it carries a gentle abrash across the field that shifts the tone slightly from one band of weaving to the next. Against it the motifs are worked in sky blue, deep navy, olive and sage green, camel, soft gold and a muted rose pink, most of them outlined in ivory so every flower separates cleanly from the red behind it. The ivory main border lifts the whole piece and keeps the red from feeling heavy, while the narrow pale blue band between border and field acts as a cool break. In daylight the blues and greens come forward; under lamplight the red deepens and the camel and gold tones read warmer.

Tabriz: Northwest Persia and the Weaving Standard

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been a commercial and court weaving center for centuries, with a workshop culture built on cartoon-drawn designs and a measured fineness system, the Raj, counted across the width of the rug. That system is why Tabriz work is so consistent: the weaver follows a drawn plan, and the curve of a vine or the round of a rosette has to hold true across 13 feet of weaving. Tabriz wool is also famously hard-wearing, and at a 3/8" pile on a cotton foundation this rug is built for a real room with real traffic rather than for display. See more Persian Tabriz rugs for how the same tradition reads across other sizes and palettes.