9'10" x 13'2" Persian Sarough Rug | Raspberry Red Field with Navy Floral Medallion | Semi-Antique

This is a full room-size semi-antique Persian Sarough, 9'10" x 13'2", hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a dense 3/8" pile that still stands up square across the whole field. The drawing is the classic central Persian formula: a deep navy lobed medallion floating on a raspberry red ground that is filled edge to edge with vine work, and a navy main border carrying ivory and rose palmettes. It is heavy, flat lying and in excellent condition, with clean ivory fringe and tight selvages, as the corner and reverse photographs show. Pieces in this proportion sit naturally with other 10x13 Persian rugs, and if you want the background on the weave before you buy, our guide to Persian Sarough rugs covers the type in detail. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a curvilinear floral medallion with a fully covered field, which is the harder of the two Sarouk formulas to draw well. At the center sits a navy 8 lobed medallion with a small rose and ivory rosette core, finished top and bottom with upright palmette pendants. Around it the red ground carries an unbroken lattice of leafy vine, serrated saz leaves, boteh, rosettes and small blossoms, each one outlined so it reads clearly rather than blurring into the ground. The 4 corner spandrels are worked in coral orange with navy palmettes, giving the field a framed diamond shape without closing it in. The main border is navy with large alternating palmette and vase style cartouches, flanked by a pair of ivory guard stripes of running flower heads and a thin rose and slate minor stripe. Note how the border turns at the corners in the close-up photograph: the pattern resolves cleanly instead of being cut off mid motif, which is the mark of a weaver working to a properly scaled cartoon.

A Burgundy and Navy Palette with Green and Ivory Lift

The ground is a saturated burgundy that leans raspberry under strong light and settles into cherry red in a lamp-lit room, and it is held in check by the near black navy of the medallion and main border. Between those two poles the weaver placed a surprising amount of secondary color: slate and teal blue in the leaf work, soft sage and bottle green in the stems, apricot and coral in the spandrels, dusty rose in the flower heads and a clean undyed ivory in the guard stripes and fringe. The ivory is the key, because it traces every border line and keeps the red and navy from reading as one dark mass. There is gentle abrash through the open red areas, the natural shift that comes from hand-dyed yarn worked across a 13 foot loom, and it gives the field movement that machine production cannot copy. For a room already built around deep tones, it belongs with our red and burgundy Persian rugs.

Sarough Weaving in Central Persia

Sarough, or Sarouk, is a village in the Arak district of central Persia, in the same weaving belt that produced Sultanabad and Mahal rugs. The district built its name on room-size pieces made for export, and the Sarough handle is unmistakable: a stout, slightly stiff body from the heavy wefting, a thick wool pile and a cotton foundation that keeps the rug lying dead flat. Local wool from the region is long stapled and oily, so the pile takes a polish with use instead of going dull, and the curvilinear drawing you see here is woven from a cartoon rather than improvised, the mark of a workshop rug rather than tribal work. On this piece the knotting is even from end to end, the two sides measure true and the pile depth is consistent across the field, so there are no thin patches where traffic has sat. A semi-antique Sarough in this condition at 9'10" x 13'2" is a rug you put down and stop thinking about for 40 years.