9'4" x 12'6" Persian Mahal Rug | Wool | Red and Ivory

A hand-knotted rug from Persia measuring 9'4" x 12'6", with a 3/8" wool pile. The field is red and crowded with floral sprays from end to end, held together by a small diamond medallion at the centre and framed by a wide ivory border. At a glance it reads as a warm, busy, evenly worn floor covering in a large room size, the kind that sits under a dining table or a full seating group without the pattern falling off the edges.

The design

The Mahal drawing here is the type the trade also files under Sarouk: detached bouquets and curling serrated leaves scattered across the open ground rather than tied into a single continuous vine. The centre holds a narrow indigo diamond with stepped, hooked edges and an ivory heart carrying one small rosette; pendants run off it top and bottom. Salmon corner pieces mark the four angles of the field. The border is built in three bands, a broad ivory main stripe of alternating rosettes and leafy palmettes set between two dark minor stripes of linked flowerheads, with thin dotted guard lines on either side and a plain red outer edge. The rug is rectangular and the layout is symmetrical along both axes.

The colour

The ground is a clear madder red, cooler and slightly pink in the raking light of the floor shots, closer to brick where the pile lies flat. Against it the main border runs a soft ivory that has taken on a faint buff tone, which keeps the frame from glaring against the field. The medallion and the minor border stripes are a deep indigo, nearly black in the corner photograph. Through the flowers there is salmon rose, a dull teal green in the leaf tips, and small points of gold and ochre at flower centres, none of them large enough to shift the overall reading of red and ivory.

The making

Hand-knotted in wool on the standard Persian construction, with a 3/8" pile that still stands up through the field and across the border. The back photograph, shot against a twelve inch rule, shows an even grid of knots with the drawing legible from the reverse and the ivory border stripe reading as clearly on the back as on the face. White fringe finishes both ends. Condition is listed as excellent, and the pile depth is consistent corner to corner in the photographs, with no visible low spots or repairs. One of many hand-knotted pieces in our full range.