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

This is the quiet, formal end of the Kashan repertoire: an ivory ground instead of the usual madder red, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands crisp and upright across the whole field. The weaver signed the piece in a cartouche woven into the main border, which on Persian Kashan rugs almost always points to a workshop loom rather than a village commission. The proportions place it with the 10x14 Persian rugs that anchor a full seating group or a 10 seat table without crowding the walls. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

A lobed central medallion sits dead center, built around a small serrated rosette and ringed by cusped cartouche shapes filled with tiny leaves and buds. Slim pendants reach off the top and bottom of the medallion into the field. Around all of it the ground is packed with an all-over drawing of palmettes, split arabesques, curled saz leaves, cypress-like sprays and small 8 petal rosettes, all carried on hair-thin scrolling vines that never break rhythm. The 4 corner spandrels are worked in the same vocabulary so they melt into the field rather than blocking it off, a drawing choice that keeps the rug from looking heavy. The main border runs a steady alternation of palmettes and rosettes linked by vine, framed on each side by narrow guard stripes of meandering flowerheads, and the signature cartouche interrupts that border with dark navy script on an ivory ground. Look closely at the close-up photographs and you can see how the outlines hold a true curve, which is only possible when the knot count supports it.

Ivory Ground with Navy, Rose and Sage Detail

The field is ivory, but not a flat one: it moves between chalk white where the light catches the pile and a warm oatmeal cream where it does not, so the ground reads soft rather than stark. Every motif is outlined in a deep navy blue that does all the drawing work and gives the pattern its definition from across a room. Inside those outlines the palette is deliberately restrained: dusty rose and old pink in the palmette hearts, a few small hits of true brick red at the medallion core, olive and sage green in the serrated leaves, sky and cornflower blue in the feathered petals, camel gold in the smaller buds, and chocolate brown along some of the vine work. The border ground carries a slightly warmer beige than the field, which quietly frames the whole thing. Overall the rug behaves as a light neutral in a room while still holding real color when you look down at it.

Kashan: The Weaving City of Central Persia

Kashan lies in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops. The city built its name on soft, lustrous local wool and on the classic formula of a red field, a navy lobed medallion and ivory spandrels, the look most people picture when they picture a Persian rug. When you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. This piece inverts that formula and puts the ivory in the field, which takes more discipline from the weaver because every knot is exposed. The weave here is what you want from a signed Kashan: even knotting from selvedge to selvedge, straight sides, a flat lie with no buckling, and fine enough density to carry curvilinear drawing over nearly 14 feet of length without the pattern drifting. Wool of this grade in a 3/8" pile is the reason these rugs survive generations of daily use in a main room.