9'2" x 12'8" Persian Kashan Rug | Signed Red Field with Indigo Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is the classic formula that made Persian Kashan rugs the benchmark for a traditional room: a deep red field, a lobed indigo medallion, ivory spandrels at the 4 corners, and a wide navy border carrying the pattern all the way out to the selvage. The weaver signed the piece, and you can see the small woven cartouche set into the outer guard stripe in the close-up photograph, which places this in workshop rather than anonymous village production. At 9'2" x 12'8" it sits at the generous end of the 9x12 Persian rugs class, with the extra length that lets a sofa and two chairs sit fully on the pile. The 3/8" wool pile is even and full across the whole surface, the ends and sides are original and sound, and the condition is excellent. Every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, size and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is pure Kashan. A stepped, lobed medallion sits dead center, outlined in ivory and filled with palmettes and curling serrated leaves, with a small ivory cartouche at its heart holding a cruciform rosette. Slim pendants rise and fall from the medallion at both ends, each finished with a bud finial. Around them the red field is covered in a dense all-over lattice of rosettes, palmettes, tulip buds and feathered leaves on fine vine work, drawn small enough that the pattern reads as texture from standing height and as individual flowers when you sit down. The ivory spandrels repeat the same vocabulary in miniature against a light ground, which keeps the corners open instead of heavy. The wide indigo main border runs a turtle palmette and arabesque vine, flanked by two pairs of narrow guard stripes in ivory and light blue with a running flower head repeat. Nothing in the layout is machine regular: the corner resolutions are hand drawn and slightly individual, which is the mark of a weaver following a cartoon by eye.

A Deep Red Field Against Dark Indigo

The field is a true Kashan red, closer to a ripe cherry than to brick, with the faint vertical variation in tone that comes from hand-dyed wool worked in batches. It reads warm under lamplight and slightly deeper in daylight. Set against it, the medallion and the main border are dark indigo, almost black at the edges of the pile and clearly blue where the light catches the wool. Between those two poles the weaver used a whole secondary palette: chalky ivory for the spandrels, the medallion center and the guard stripes; a bright mid blue that lifts the guard borders and the inner flowers; olive and sage green in the leaf work; soft rose and salmon in the smaller blossoms; and touches of gold and rust in the palmette hearts. The overall effect is rich rather than dark, because the ivory outlining keeps every motif separated from the red ground.

Kashan Weaving and Workshop Quality

Kashan lies in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops that produced some of the most famous carpets in the world. The town's advantage was always its wool, a soft and lustrous local fleece that takes red dye particularly well and keeps its sheen for decades of use. That lustre is why the Kashan look has become shorthand for a formal Persian floor: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. Turn this rug over and the back shows a tight, regular cotton foundation with clean, level knotting and crisp motif definition, the sign of an experienced weaver working on a properly tensioned loom rather than rushing a commercial order. Combined with the signature cartouche and the full 3/8" pile, it is a piece with plenty of life still in front of it.