9'4" x 13'1" Persian Isfahan Najafabad Rug | Red Allover Floral Medallion | Excellent Condition

A room-size city weave in the classic central Persian idiom, this 9'4" x 13'1" Persian Isfahan rug was knotted in the Najafabad workshops just west of Isfahan on a cotton foundation with a fine wool pile. The red field carries a dense allover floral drawing around a lobed central medallion, framed by a deep navy main border, and the pile still stands full and even with clear definition in every rosette. It is a piece that reads formal from across the room and rewards a closer look at the knot level, and it falls squarely in the proportions buyers want from large Persian rugs. Condition is excellent, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting its origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is curvilinear from edge to edge. A lobed central medallion sits in the middle of the field with a small 8 petal rosette at its core, surrounded by paired palmettes, split-leaf arabesques and hooked serrated leaves that turn on fine vine scrolls. From the medallion the pattern opens into a full allover floral field, so the red ground is covered in rosettes, lotus heads, cloud-band leaves and connecting tendrils with almost no empty space left. Pale spandrels close off the 4 corners with their own scrolling vine, and the border system runs wide: a navy main border of alternating palmettes and flowering vine, flanked by several narrow guard stripes in ivory and blue that step the eye out to the selvage. The corner photograph shows how cleanly the border turns, with the pattern resolving at the angle rather than being cut off, which is the mark of a drawn cartoon followed properly rather than an improvised repeat.

The Colors

The field is a warm tomato red that deepens toward brick in low light, and it is worked with enough blue over the top to keep it from going flat. The medallion, the main border and the arabesque outlines are a dark indigo navy, and inside them sit lighter notes of mid blue and a soft powder blue that lift the center of the rug. The 4 spandrels are the surprise: they read as a pale green-gold, a chartreuse tone that brightens in daylight and settles toward olive indoors, and that same green reappears in the leaves scattered across the field. Ivory runs through the guard stripes and the smaller rosettes as a crisp outline color, with quiet touches of rose pink and a light tan in the flower heads. The overall effect is a saturated traditional palette, red and blue carrying the structure while green and ivory do the detail work.

Isfahan and the Najafabad Workshops

Isfahan sits in central Persia and has been a weaving center since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century. Its reputation rests on drawing: the curved line, the continuous vine, the precise resolution of a medallion into its corners, none of which survives at a coarse knot count. Najafabad lies a short distance west of the city and weaves to that same vocabulary, traditionally on a cotton foundation with a hard-wearing wool pile, which is why Najafabad pieces are prized as the room-size, everyday-use expression of the Isfahan design rather than a fragile silk showpiece. You can see the workshop discipline in this rug: the knot lines stay straight across more than 13 feet of length, the field repeat keeps its spacing without drifting, and the pile is clipped low enough for the pattern to stay legible. Woven in Persia, in excellent condition, and built on the kind of wool that takes decades of traffic without losing its surface.