9'11" x 13'1" Persian Kashan Rug | Ivory Allover Floral Medallion | Signed Border Cartouche

This is the quiet, pale side of the Kashan tradition: an ivory ground worked edge to edge in fine wool, with a soft lobed medallion floating in the middle of the field and a signature cartouche woven into the inner border. At 9'11" x 13'1" it covers a full formal room, and it sits squarely in the most requested of all 10x13 Persian rug sizes. The pile is a full 3/8" of wool on a cotton foundation, the ends and sides are intact, and the condition is excellent. If you want the background on the weaving town and its court workshop lineage, our guide to Persian Kashan rugs covers it. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity that records the origin, materials, knotting and measurements of this exact piece.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Kashan formula but in an unusually open, airy register. A lobed central medallion, taupe-washed and filled with white arabesque scrollwork, is built around an 8 petal rosette with a red center, and it finishes top and bottom in slender pendants that reach out into the field. Around it the ivory ground is filled with a continuous allover system of palmettes, curling serrated leaves, Shah Abbasi blossoms and thin vine scrolls, all balanced so that the mirrored halves of the field answer each other exactly. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the medallion vocabulary in condensed form and are outlined in navy. The main border is a wide taupe band of alternating rosettes and palmettes linked by a running vine, flanked on both sides by paired ivory guard stripes carrying a smaller flowerhead repeat. Set into the inner border is the rectangular signature cartouche, dark script on a pale ground, the mark of a workshop piece rather than an anonymous village weaving.

A Study in Ivory, Taupe and Blue

The field is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to stark white, and because the wool takes light unevenly across a 3/8" pile it shifts between pale sand and soft champagne as you walk the length of the rug. Against that ground the palette is almost entirely cool: sky blue flowerheads, deeper cornflower blue petals, and near-black navy used as the outlining color for every leaf, stem and cartouche frame. The medallion and the wide border are drawn in a muted taupe that reads as greige in daylight, which is what keeps the whole rug in the neutral family rather than the traditional Kashan red. Small quantities of ochre gold, olive, cinnamon brown and a few points of true red appear inside the rosettes, and those tiny warm accents are what stop the ivory and blue from going flat. The overall effect is a formal Persian rug that behaves like a neutral, which is exactly why this colorway is so hard to find in a full 10x13.

Kashan: Central Persia and the Workshop Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia north of Isfahan, and its weaving lineage runs straight back to the Safavid court workshops, which is why the town has always been associated with soft, lustrous local wool and with disciplined, symmetrical drawing rather than tribal improvisation. Kashan is also the rug most Americans have already seen without knowing its name: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. This example is workshop work throughout. The knotting is even from selvage to selvage, the curved lines of the vine scroll hold their shape over more than 13 feet without wobbling, and the back photograph shows tight, regular rows on a cotton foundation, the kind of weave that lets a rug carry a fine floral repeat at room size. The signed cartouche confirms that a named atelier stood behind it, and a rug built this way, with a heavy wool pile and an undamaged structure, is made to be walked on for generations rather than protected.