9'10" x 16'1" Persian Kashmar Rug | Navy Blue Allover Vase & Boteh Design | Signed Cartouche

At 9'10" x 16'1" this is a true room-filling Kashmar from Khorasan in northeast Persia, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and signed by its weaver in a small ivory cartouche set into the top of the navy field. The drawing is dense and fully symmetrical, with flowering vases, long curling botehs and a lobed center medallion laid over a midnight ground, and the pile still stands tall and even across all 158 square feet. Pieces of this length rarely survive in this condition, which puts it in the small group of genuinely usable antique-style oversize Persian rugs rather than the wall-hanging category. It ships with our certificate of authenticity recording size, origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The composition works on two levels at once. A lobed sky blue medallion with a dark green core sits at the center, filled with small rosettes and framed by ivory and rose arabesque leaves, while the navy field around it carries a full allover garden: footed vases spilling flowers, elongated botehs drawn in taupe and brown with fine contour outlines, 8 petal rosettes, serrated leaves and scrolling vine that never repeats itself in an obvious way. Scalloped ivory cartouches float through the field, several of them holding paired animal figures facing one another, and the same paired figures reappear above vases in the medallion cartouches at the center of each border. The 4 corners carry brick red spandrels with hooked arabesques, and the border system runs three deep: a rose and navy arabesque outer band, a light guard stripe of linked rosettes, and a narrow inner stripe that keeps the whole field contained.

The Navy Blue Palette

The ground is a deep midnight navy that reads almost aubergine where the light falls across the knot, and it is doing the hard work here: every other color in the rug is placed against it for contrast. Rose and antique pink carry the border vine and the arabesques inside the medallion, brick red anchors the corner spandrels and the larger palmettes, and a clear sky blue opens up the medallion field and the guard stripes so the center does not disappear into the dark ground. Olive and moss green outline the leaves, ivory picks out the cartouches and the star rosettes, and soft taupe and walnut brown fill the botehs, which is what gives the field its slightly smoky, aged tonality. It is a formal rug rather than a bright one, and it behaves like most navy blue Persian rugs in a room: it grounds dark wood, leather and warm plaster walls instead of competing with them.

Kashmar and the Khorasan Weaving Tradition

Kashmar lies in Khorasan, southwest of the shrine city that gives the region its reputation, and its weavers work in the same tradition as the Persian Mashad rugs of the province: large formats, curvilinear drawing carried out from a full cartoon, and the long-staple Khorasan wool that takes a deep dye and polishes with use. The signature is the detail that matters most on this piece. A woven cartouche means the rug came off a named workshop loom rather than a village loom, and on a 16 foot format that means a team of weavers working a single cartoon to the same tension for the better part of a year. The back photograph shows the result: straight, tightly packed rows of wool knots on a cotton warp, consistent from selvage to selvage, with no visible abrash breaks or run-off in the drawing. That density is why the pile has held its height and why a rug this size still lies flat and handles like a much younger piece.