9'11" x 12'10" Persian Mashad Rug | Red Field Floral Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is a full room size Persian Mashad rug measuring 9'11" x 12'10", hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands up evenly from end to end. The drawing is the classic Mashad formula, a deep red field carrying a layered central medallion with matching pendants and heavily worked corner spandrels, all framed by a navy main border of open flower heads. Laid out on the showroom floor in the photographs, the piece reads as a single balanced composition rather than a busy one, which is what separates a good Mashad from an ordinary one. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity confirming it was hand-knotted in Persia.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 petal rosette set inside a sky blue star, which sits inside a cream cartouche, which in turn sits on a navy lobed medallion outlined in rose. That nesting of 4 distinct layers is visible in the close-up photograph and is the part of the design that takes the most skill to keep symmetrical. Split palmettes and curling arabesque leaves radiate off the medallion in all 4 directions, and slim pendants run north and south toward the field ends. The open red ground between the medallion and the spandrels is filled with small detached flowering sprays and thin vine stems, spaced so the field still breathes. The corner spandrels carry a denser vocabulary of vases, rosettes and serrated leaves against sky blue and ivory. The main border runs a repeating rhythm of large flower heads and feathery leaves on navy, flanked by camel colored guard stripes with a fine meander, and a narrow zigzag minor stripe closes the whole thing off cleanly at the selvedge.

Red, Ivory and Sky Blue Coloring

The field is a true tomato red that leans slightly toward brick where the light catches the pile, and it shows the soft natural variation across the width that comes from hand-dyed wool rather than a flat machine tone. Against it, the navy of the medallion outline and main border is deep enough to look near black in shadow, giving the design its structure. The sky blue reads as the second voice, bright and clear in the medallion core and repeated through the spandrels so the eye travels from center to corners. Ivory does the fine work: it outlines the cartouche, picks out individual petals, and forms the narrow guard lines that keep the borders separated. Supporting tones fill in around those four, with rose pink in the palmettes, camel and soft gold in the guard stripes, and small touches of olive green and pale aqua in the leaves. The fringe is a natural ivory, and the sides are overcast in red.

Mashad Weaving in Khorasan

Mashad sits in Khorasan in the northeast of Persia and has woven large medallion rugs for the city's workshops for well over a century. The looms there are built wide, which is why Mashad is one of the few weaving centers that turns out genuine room sizes like this one with the medallion properly centered and the borders meeting square at all 4 corners. The wool from the region is long stapled and takes dye well, and it wears in rather than wearing out, so a Mashad in this condition still has decades of floor life left. The back photograph shows tight, regular knotting on pale cotton warps, the mark of a workshop piece rather than village work. At 9'11" x 12'10" this belongs with the 10x13 Persian rugs that anchor a large seating area with furniture set fully on the pile.