9'10" x 13'2" Persian Kashan Rug | Red Floral Medallion | Signed Cartouche, Excellent Condition

A signed piece is a workshop piece, and this one wears its cartouche openly in the end border, woven in dark script across a green and red ground. The rug measures 9'10" x 13'2", hand-knotted on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" wool pile that still has its full body and sheen, and it is in excellent condition with even pile from edge to edge. The drawing follows the classic formula that made Persian Kashan rugs the benchmark for a formal room: a red field densely filled with flowering vine, a navy lobed medallion with an ivory heart, and matching spandrels anchoring the 4 corners. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is built in layers: a small turquoise and rose rosette at the core, set in an ivory cartouche, framed by a navy stepped outline that steps out to fine pendants at each end. Curling acanthus leaves and palmettes fill the navy ground of the medallion, and the same vocabulary repeats at quarter scale across the field, where thin green vines carry rosettes, tulip heads and split leaves in a balanced all-over lattice rather than an empty open ground. The 4 corner spandrels mirror the medallion in navy with ivory outlining, so the eye reads the field as a framed garden. The border system is generous for a rug this size: a wide navy main band of connected palmettes and vine, flanked by light blue and ivory guard stripes carrying small repeating blossoms, and a narrow outer stripe that finishes the rug cleanly against the red selvage.

The Color: Deep Red Field Read Through Navy, Ivory and Light Blue

The field is a true Kashan red, a deep cochineal tone with a cool edge rather than an orange one, and it holds its saturation right into the corners. Against it the borders and medallion run dark indigo navy, which is the contrast that gives the rug its weight and keeps it from reading as a single block of color. The secondary palette does the drawing: chalky ivory for the medallion heart, the spandrel outlines and the guard stripes, a soft sky and turquoise blue through the flower heads and leaf tips, dusty rose and salmon in the palmettes, sage green in the vines, and small strikes of gold and ochre that appear mostly in the border blossoms and in the signature cartouche. The overall effect is a warm red room-anchoring floor with enough cool blue in it to sit beside navy, grey or natural linen upholstery without fighting.

Kashan Origin and Weaving Quality

Kashan sits in central Persia north of Isfahan and has been weaving on a court workshop tradition since the Safavid period, working with soft, lustrous local wool and a tight cotton warp that lets the weavers draw a curved line cleanly. That tradition is why the Kashan look is the one most people picture when they picture a Persian rug: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. The back of this piece shows small, regular knots with crisp color separation between the vine and the ground, which is what allows the fine ivory outlining to hold at this scale, and the wool has the slight glow that Kashan fleece keeps for decades under foot. At 9'10" x 13'2" it falls squarely in the range buyers search as 10x13 Persian rugs, large enough to carry a full seating group or a 10 seat table with all chairs on the wool, and heavy enough that it lies flat and stays put without slipping.