9'4" x 13'6" Persian Kashmar Rug | Ancient Vase and Animal Pictorial Design | 1970s, Perfect Condition

Woven in the 1970s in the Khorasan region of northeast Persia, this 9'4" x 13'6" Kashmar carries one of the busiest and most entertaining fields in the whole Persian repertoire. A midnight navy ground is packed with flowering vases, footed bowls, birds and small standing animals, all circling a turquoise and red medallion, while the wide ruby border answers with ivory cartouches holding more vases. The pile is a dense 3/8" of hand-spun wool on a cotton foundation, still full and level after 50 years, with sound selvedges and complete ends. At this footprint it covers a great room or a formal dining setting the way most 10x14 Persian rugs do, and every rug leaves us with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is the classic Ancient Kashmar formula, a pictorial garden rather than a repeating pattern. At the center sits an elongated medallion with a turquoise ground, an 8 petal rosette core and a ruby surround edged in ivory, finished with slender pendants top and bottom. Around it the navy field is filled with more than 30 separate vessels: fluted urns, two-handled amphorae, wide fruit bowls and footed cups, each spilling blossoms, palmettes and curling vines. Between them are small woven creatures, birds perched on branches, standing deer and grazing quadrupeds, plus pale sage panels in the corners carrying block-like script devices. The main border repeats the theme at larger scale, alternating turquoise shield cartouches with ivory vase cartouches across a red ground, and the guard stripes carry a fine meandering vine of rosettes on ivory. Nothing in the layout is mechanical; each vase is drawn a little differently from its neighbor, which is how you tell a genuine Kashmar loom from a copy.

A Jewel Tone Palette of Navy, Turquoise and Ruby Red

The field is a deep midnight navy that photographs almost black at a distance and opens into true indigo up close. Against it the weavers set a bright peacock turquoise, used for the medallion ground, the inner field band that frames the whole composition and dozens of individual vases, so the blue reads on two distinct registers at once. The border is a clean ruby red, cooler and more saturated than a Kashan red, with ivory cartouches and an ivory outer guard providing the break between the two. Filling the drawing are camel gold and old brass for the scrolling leaves, rose pink and soft coral in the blossoms, small strikes of sage green, cream and a rare touch of burnt orange on the birds. The wool has taken on the light sheen that 50 years of settling gives a good Khorasan fleece, so the reds glow rather than shout. In a room the rug anchors navy, cream and brass schemes, and pulls warm reds out of leather and mahogany.

Kashmar and the Weaving Towns of Khorasan

Kashmar is a town in Khorasan, northeast Persia, south west of the great weaving city that anchors the region, and its looms work inside the same Khorasan weaving tradition centered on Mashad. The town made its name on exactly this kind of pictorial vase field, a design so associated with the place that dealers simply call it Ancient Kashmar. Knotting is Persian asymmetric on a cotton warp and weft, beaten down firmly so the back is tight and the outline work stays crisp at small scale, which is what allows a weaver to render a bird the size of a thumbnail without it turning to mush. Khorasan wool is long stapled and takes dye deeply, and the 3/8" clip on this piece leaves enough body to walk on daily for another generation. A 9'4" x 13'6" example of this design in perfect condition, with no repair, no low spots and no reduction, is an increasingly hard thing to find.