9'10" x 15'11" Persian Tabriz Rug | Signed All-Over Floral Field | Fine Wool Pile | Excellent Condition

This is a room-filling 9'10" x 15'11" Persian Tabriz woven in the classic all-over manner, with a deep red field carrying an unbroken lattice of palmettes and blossoms from one end to the other and a broad ivory border framing the whole. The weaver signed the piece with a woven cartouche set into the inner border at one end, which in Tabriz means the rug left a named workshop rather than an anonymous loom. The wool pile is clipped at 3/8", low enough to hold the fine drawing crisp and still deep enough to live under furniture for decades, and the back photograph shows a level, tightly packed weave on a cotton foundation with no repairs, no reweaving and no thin areas. At just under 10 by 16 feet it belongs with the oversize Persian rugs that anchor a great room or a long formal dining table. Every rug ships with our certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. Instead the field carries a repeating all-over floral design built from large serrated palmettes, lotus heads, curled acanthus leaves and small 8 petal rosettes, all strung together by a hairline vine that runs on a strict vertical and horizontal mirror. The close-up shows how much drawing sits inside each single motif: a palmette is outlined in one shade, filled with a second, then shadowed with a third and tipped in ivory, and the slender cypress-like sprays that rise between the rows keep the repeat from ever looking mechanical. The wide ivory main border holds a procession of paired palmettes and split leaves turning on their own vine, flanked on both sides by light blue guard stripes with a running meander, and outside those a narrow red and ivory zigzag band at the selvedge. The 4 corners are resolved cleanly, with the border pattern turning the angle rather than being cut off, which is a mark of a properly drawn cartoon. The signature cartouche sits centred in the light blue inner border at one end, reserved on a pale ground so it reads as a deliberate part of the composition.

Colour Palette in Detail

The field is a deep tomato red with a faint madder warmth to it, and the vine scroll laid over that red in pale ivory is what gives the ground its sense of movement. Against it the weaver worked an unusually cool secondary palette: sky blue and slate blue in the palmette interiors, indigo and near-black navy for outlines and the darkest leaf bodies, and soft sage to olive green in the small stems and leaf tips. Warmer notes appear in small doses, dusty rose and salmon in the blossom petals, camel and a light gold in the flower centres, and cocoa brown shading the backs of the larger leaves. The main border shifts the balance completely, with a creamy ivory ground that lightens the whole rug and makes the red field read as the centre of attention, its motifs picked out in the same blues, greens and roses so nothing feels imported from another design. The light blue guard bands act as a cool seam between field and border, and the ivory fringe at both ends keeps the ends bright. It is a red rug that works with cool grey and blue rooms as easily as with warm wood and cream.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organised weaving city for centuries, the place where master designers, dyers and loom workshops operate side by side and where fineness is still quoted in Raj, the count of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in of width. Curvilinear all-over drawing of this kind is the Tabriz speciality, because a flowing vine and a palmette outlined in 4 shades only hold their shape when the knot count is high enough to draw a true curve, and the reverse photograph shows exactly that: small, square, evenly beaten knots in straight ranks on a cotton warp, with the border pattern legible from the back. Tabriz rugs are also built to be used, with a firm handle, a tight selvedge and wool chosen for resilience rather than only for sheen, which is why a piece this size survives generations of furniture and foot traffic in excellent condition. A workshop signature on an oversize Tabriz like this one narrows it further, from a city product to a single named loom that expected its work to be recognised.