9'5" x 12'10" Persian Tabriz Rug | Pinkish Grey Floral Medallion | Excellent Condition

A room-size Tabriz woven on a soft pinkish grey ground, which is an unusual and quietly sophisticated field color for this city, set against a deep navy medallion and a navy main border. The drawing is fully curvilinear, the wool is hand-spun and lustrous, and the pile stands a full 3/8" with clean, even wear across all 4 corners and original ivory fringes at both ends. At 9'5" x 12'10" it covers a standard 10 by 13 furniture plan with the pattern still reading as one composition, which is exactly where large Persian rugs earn their keep. Every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Tabriz medallion and corner formula, drawn with far more incident than most. A lobed navy medallion sits dead center, filled with an ivory 8 petal rosette and rings of small pink and blue blossoms, and it finishes top and bottom in pendants shaped like arched niches with fluted columns. The pinkish grey field around it is not empty: it carries a dense, freehand scatter of flowering vine, boteh, palmettes, feathery serrated leaves and small stylized cypress and weeping willow trees, with tiny birds tucked into the branches. The 4 spandrels are ivory, each one anchored by a large weeping willow and a cluster of blossoms, and they are outlined in a fine rose red serrated line that separates them cleanly from the field. The navy main border runs a rhythm of big rose red palmettes alternating with green and blue leaf sprays and more perched birds, framed by sage green minor guard borders of small white rosettes. Both the medallion corners and the border turns are properly resolved, which is the mark of a drawn cartoon rather than a copied one.

The Color Palette in Detail

The field is the reason to buy this rug: a muted pinkish grey, somewhere between dusty rose, old salmon and warm taupe, that shifts a shade lighter or deeper as the light moves across it. Against that soft ground the navy of the medallion and the main border reads almost black at the edges and clear indigo in direct light. Ivory does the structural work in the spandrels, the medallion rosette and the guard stripes, keeping the composition from going muddy. Inside the ornament the weaver used a genuinely broad palette: rose red and crimson in the palmettes, sage and olive green in the leaves, sky blue and cobalt in the small flowerheads, soft gold and camel in the vine scrolls, plus touches of aubergine, teal and cream in the birds and blossoms. The overall effect is warm and low-contrast from across the room and surprisingly colorful up close, which makes it easy to live with alongside grey, cream, walnut or navy furnishings.

Tabriz Weaving and Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most commercially serious weaving city for centuries, the place where the modern Persian rug trade was effectively organized. Tabriz weavers measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots counted across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches of width, and they work from a drawn cartoon with a hooked knife rather than by memory, which is why Tabriz drawing holds curved lines, resolved corners and true symmetry at this scale. This piece is a workshop weave on a cotton foundation with hand-spun wool pile, tightly packed and firm in the hand, with the back showing a clear, regular knot grid right through the border as seen in the detail photograph. The wool has the slight sheen good Azerbaijani fleece keeps after decades, the sides are original and the ends are secure, and the pile has enough depth left to give another generation of daily use in a living room, dining room or study.