9'5" x 12' Persian Bakhtiar Rug | Garden Panel Khesti Design | 1970s, Excellent Condition

This is the garden panel Bakhtiar in its classic room-size format, hand-knotted in the 1970s on a cotton foundation with a heavy natural wool pile. The field is divided into a grid of small compartments, each one carrying its own tree, vine or flowering vase, and no two neighbouring panels repeat the same combination of ground colour and motif. The wool has the slightly glossy, springy handle that highland flocks give, and the pile is still full right across the field, with clean hand-tied fringes and tight selvages. At 9'5" x 12' it sits squarely in the most useful of all 9x12 Persian rugs proportions, large enough to carry a full seating group with the front legs on. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The khesti, or compartment, layout is the signature Bakhtiar drawing: a lattice of squares and diamonds, each framed by a narrow cartouche band and pinned at the crossings by an 8 petal rosette in blue and ivory. Inside the panels the weaver worked through a whole garden vocabulary. Ivory boxes hold ranks of small cypress and weeping willow trees, brown panels carry a curling grapevine with pink grape clusters, indigo panels show a single flowering branch with apricot leaves, and red panels are filled with vases, curved boteh and stiff-stemmed blossoms. This is an all-over garden panel design with no central medallion, so the eye keeps moving. The main border runs large ivory and navy palmettes with serrated orange boteh on a red ground, held between reciprocal ivory guard stripes with a small arrowhead figure.

The Antique Red, Indigo and Brown Palette

The colour reads as an antique red overall, but it is built from several distinct grounds working against each other. The compartment frames and the main border are a deep madder red that has mellowed toward brick, with a cooler rose tone appearing in the older-looking panels. Against that sit two blues: a mid indigo used for the flowering branch squares, and a near-black navy that outlines the panels and fills the small dividers. A warm chocolate brown, almost aubergine where the light catches it, carries the grapevine panels and gives the field its depth. Ivory and cream squares break the grid at regular intervals and keep the whole surface bright, while soft apricot, salmon and a clear orange appear in the leaves, boteh and rosette centres. Slight variation from panel to panel is natural in a hand-dyed village weave and is exactly what keeps a rug like this from looking printed.

Bakhtiar Weaving in Western Persia

The Bakhtiari are a tribal confederation of western Persia, and the best of their weaving comes from the settled villages of the Chahar Mahal district southwest of Isfahan, places such as Shalamzar, Saman and Chalshotor. Village looms there work to a village standard rather than a workshop one: a cotton warp and weft, a double weft between rows, a firm beat-down and a fairly heavy wool pile. The result is a rug built for daily life, thick underfoot and unusually resistant to traffic, which is why so many Persian Bakhtiar rugs from this period are still in service 50 years on. The drawing is deliberately squared and graphic rather than curvilinear, and in a piece this size the weaver had to hold the panel grid straight over 12 feet of length, which this one does.