9'10" x 13'4" Persian Kashan Rug | Ivory Floral Medallion | Signed Border Cartouche

This is a signed workshop Kashan on an ivory ground, which is the harder version of the design to weave well: there is no dark field to hide a wandering line, so every vine, every leaf tip and every blossom has to sit exactly where the drawing says. It does. The scalloped medallion lands dead center across 160 inches of length, the spandrels answer each other at all 4 corners, and a small cartouche woven into the inner border carries the weaver's name in navy script. The 3/8" wool pile is full and even, the handle is supple, and the condition is excellent with no wear or repair to report. It ships with a certificate of authenticity. At 9'10" x 13'4" it belongs in the 10x13 Persian rug range, and if you want the background on the town and the weave, our Persian Kashan rugs guide lays it out.

Design and Motifs

The center is a scalloped, lobed medallion built out from an 8 petal rosette with a single red heart, ringed by tiers of lanceolate leaves and tiny palmettes that widen outward like a slow explosion. Around it the ivory field is not left open: it is filled edge to edge with a curving vine that carries lotus blossoms, split palmettes, rosettes and cloudband tendrils, all outlined in navy so the drawing holds its shape from standing height. Four matching spandrels pin the corners, each one a quarter repeat of the medallion vocabulary so the eye reads the composition as a single closed garden. The border system runs five deep: a wide main border of alternating palmettes and flowering vine, flanked by narrow guard stripes of running floral meander and a fine reciprocal edge stripe that frames the whole rug. Into one of those inner stripes the workshop set its signature cartouche, an oval panel of navy script on ivory wool, visible in the detail photograph. Signed borders like this are how a Kashan tells you it came off a workshop loom rather than a village one.

The Ivory, Blue and Olive Green Palette

The ground is a creamy ivory with a faint oatmeal warmth to it, the color of undyed lustrous wool rather than a bleached white, and it carries the entire rug. Over that ground the weaver worked a cool family of blues: a powdery light blue that fills the medallion interior and the larger palmettes, a clearer sky blue in the smaller blossoms, and a deep navy reserved for outlines, stems and the signature script, which is what gives the pattern its definition. The third voice is olive green, used softly in the leafwork and washing across the border ground, where it mixes with a greyed sage and warm taupe to keep the frame quieter than the field. Small accents do the rest of the work: cocoa brown in the leaf tips, a mushroom grey in the vine, and single pinpricks of rust red at the center of rosettes, no more than a few dozen knots each, which stop the whole palette from going cold. The result is a genuinely neutral Persian rug that reads ivory and soft blue from across the room and reveals green and brown up close.

Kashan: The Town and the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan on the edge of the desert, and its looms descend directly from the Safavid court workshop tradition of the 16th century. The town's advantages were soft lustrous local wool and a drawing discipline that never really loosened: curvilinear medallions, closed floral fields, deep multi-stripe borders, and the willingness to weave fine enough to render a curve as a curve. That is the formula in front of you, taken off the usual red ground and rebuilt on ivory. The back of this rug, shown against a ruler, is tight and regular, with straight rows and no pulls or uneven beating, which is what lets the 3/8" pile sit flat and take furniture across a 9'10" x 13'4" room without crushing. Kashan is also the design most Americans have already seen without knowing its name: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. A signed, ivory-ground example in this size and this condition is the collectible end of that same tradition.