9'11" x 13'3" Persian Sarouk Rug | Red Field, Navy Floral Borders | Semi-Antique, Excellent Condition

A full room size piece at 9'11" x 13'3", this hand-knotted Sarouk carries the formal floral vocabulary that made Persian Sarouk rugs the standard choice for American dining rooms and parlors for most of the last century. The wool pile sits on a cotton foundation, the handle is firm and heavy for its size, and the pile depth is even from end to end with both ends and sides intact. Buyers comparing 10x13 Persian rugs will notice how much drawing this one fits into the field without crowding the open red ground. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a small lobed navy medallion with an ivory and rose core built around a stepped diamond, flanked by two navy pendant finials that reach out along the long axis. Instead of a connected lattice, the field is filled with detached flowering sprays: bouquets of rosettes, buds and serrated leaves that float free on the open ground, with a vase of flowers anchoring each end of the medallion axis. A scalloped light blue surround frames the field and carries its own vine and blossom scroll, breaking into bracketed corner panels. The wide navy main border runs a procession of roses, lotus blossoms and upright palmettes, with large ivory cartouche-shaped lobes projecting inward at the midpoints of each side and again at the 4 corners, a courtly device that gives the border the look of a carved frame. Ivory scrolling vine guard stripes separate the border from an outer red band drawn with the same vine motif in miniature.

A Tomato Red Field Against Indigo and Ivory

The field is a warm tomato red, clear and slightly coral in direct light, deepening toward brick where the pile lies away from the viewer. That single expanse of red is what makes this one of the more usable red and burgundy Persian rugs in a large format, since the open ground gives the eye somewhere to rest. The main border is a deep indigo navy, nearly black at the edges of the photographs, and the contrast between it and the red is softened by the pale sky blue of the field surround and by the cream and butter ivory of the guard stripes and corner lobes. Within the flowers the palette is gentler than the frame: rose and salmon pink petals, mustard and olive gold leaves, powder blue buds, small touches of pale green and the occasional ivory highlight. Reds and pinks sit on the warm side of the spectrum here, which lets the rug work with cherry, walnut and antique mahogany furniture without a clash.

Sarouk Weaving in Central Persia

Sarouk is a weaving town in the Arak district of central Persia, and its looms built a reputation on two things: dense, tightly packed wool and curvilinear floral drawing executed cleanly on a cotton warp. This piece shows both. The knot count is high enough to hold the fine stems and the small ivory outlines inside the border lobes, while the wool itself is springy and heavy, the kind of pile that recovers from furniture rather than crushing flat. The reverse, visible in the final photograph, shows tight regular rows and a clean red selvage with original fringe on a cotton foundation, consistent with a well made town weave rather than a coarse village piece. Semi-antique Sarouks in this size and condition are getting harder to find with the pile still full, and the formal border treatment on this one is more ambitious than the standard floral spray Sarouk of the same period.