9'10" x 13'4" Persian Kashmar Rug | Signed Vase and Bird Medallion | Black Field, Excellent Condition

A signed weaver's cartouche sits in the ivory border of this 9'10" x 13'4" Persian Kashmar, and a signature on a rug of this scale means one workshop took responsibility for the whole 131 square feet of it. The field is a deep black with navy depth, filled edge to edge with footed vases, covered urns, shallow bowls, blossoming vines and small woven birds and animals, while a beige and lavender stepped medallion anchors the center. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, still full and even across the surface with clean selvedges and tidy fringes, and the drawing stays crisp in the corners where these large formats usually go slack. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity, and this one measures a true room size for a dining table or a seating group, which puts it squarely in the most searched of all formats, 10x13 Persian rugs.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a classic Kashmar treatment: a pointed, stepped central medallion with a small 8 petal rosette at its heart, flanked by two amber pendants and finished top and bottom with cypress-shaped finials. What makes the field unusual is that it is not a plain all-over floral. It is a vase and vessel composition, with tall handled amphorae, lidded jars, footed fruit bowls and low bulbous pots arranged in mirrored pairs across the black ground, each one drawn with its own banded decoration. Curling acanthus leaves, Shah Abbasi palmettes and rosettes fill the space between them, and in the 4 corners of the field, set on pale lavender spandrels, there are woven birds and long-tailed creatures perched among the vines. A small squared panel reading like an architectural tile appears near each spandrel. The main border runs a chain of large serrated boteh and palmettes on ivory, framed by narrow vine guard stripes and an outer red band, and the signature cartouche interrupts the inner border with Persian script in a plain ivory ground.

A Black Field Carrying Beige, Lavender and Burgundy

The ground is a true black, cooling to inky navy where the light catches the wool, and it does what dark fields do best: every lighter color laid on it reads twice as bright. The medallion works through three tones, a soft lavender-grey core, a pale ivory inner ring drawn with red and blue scrolling flowers, and a wheat-beige outer frame. Around it the vessels pick up beige, cream, dusty rose, chalky lilac and a warm caramel brown, with olive and antique gold in the leafwork. Burgundy and brick red do the structural work, outlining the medallion, filling the rosettes and returning as the outermost band that frames the whole rug. Small touches of steel blue, soft green and apricot appear in the flower heads and in the birds. The spandrels are washed in pale lavender, which lifts the 4 corners away from the black and keeps the composition from feeling heavy. It is a dark rug that photographs light, and against pale walls or wood floors the beige and ivory read first.

Kashmar Weaving in Khorasan

Kashmar is a town in Khorasan, in the northeast of Persia, roughly 130 miles southwest of the provincial capital, and its looms grew out of the same regional tradition that produced Persian Mashad rugs. Khorasan wool is long stapled and takes dye deeply, which is why the blacks and burgundies here have body rather than looking flat, and why the pile still has luster after years on the floor. Kashmar workshops are known for large room sizes woven in one clean run, with pictorial and vase compositions that let a weaver show drawing ability across a wide field, and this piece is a good example of that discipline: the mirrored vases line up, the medallion sits true to center, and the border turns the corners without the pattern breaking. The knotting is even and firm, the back shows a regular, tightly packed grid on a cotton foundation, and at 3/8" the pile is substantial enough to take real traffic under a dining table for decades.