9'5" x 13'7" Persian Mashad Rug | Signed Red Floral Medallion | 1980s Wool Pile

Signed pieces are the ones worth stopping for, and this one carries its cartouche woven into the ivory end border, where the workshop put its name into the fabric of the rug itself rather than onto a label. It measures 9'5" x 13'7", dates to the 1980s, and is hand-knotted entirely by hand on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" wool pile that still stands full and even from edge to edge. The drawing is the formal classical layout that Persian Mashad rugs are known for: one navy medallion floating on a deep red field, pendants above and below, peach cornerpieces, and a wide indigo border of boteh paisleys. As a true room size at nearly 10 by 14 feet, it sits comfortably with other 10x14 Persian rugs while offering something most of them do not, which is a signature. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, size and age.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is a lobed indigo cartouche filled with curling vinework, and inside it sits a tight 8 petal rosette worked in orange, gold and sky blue, the single brightest point in the whole piece. Slim navy pendants run north and south of it into the field, each finished with a small floral finial. Around all of that the red ground is covered edge to edge with an all over lattice of delicate flowering sprays: sky blue blossoms, cream rosettes, olive leaves and tiny pink buds, drawn small enough that the field reads as texture from standing height and as hundreds of individual flowers from a chair. The 4 corners carry peach spandrels filled with scrolling arabesques and leaf forms, which lightens the top and bottom of the composition considerably. The main border is the memorable part: large boteh paisleys in alternating sizes, each one packed with its own miniature floral interior, set on indigo and separated by ivory and rose guard stripes. The cartouche with the signature interrupts that ivory band at one end, framed and readable, exactly where a workshop piece should be marked.

Color Palette

The field is a bright, saturated cherry red with a cool raspberry edge to it, not a brick or rust tone, and it is the reason this rug lifts a room rather than grounding it quietly. Against that, the medallion and border grounds go almost black blue, a deep indigo navy that gives the design its structure and makes the red look even more intense where the two meet. The small flowers supply the rest of the range: sky blue and aqua, which read almost turquoise in daylight, soft moss and olive greens in the leaves, cream and ivory outlines that keep every motif legible, and warm orange and terracotta concentrated in the medallion core and scattered through the paisleys. Peach and salmon in the spandrels and outer border act as the bridge between the red and the ivory guard stripes, and small touches of rose pink and brown appear inside the individual boteh. It is a confident, high contrast reading of red Persian color, and if you are shopping the wider range of red Persian rugs this is the bright end of that spectrum rather than the deep burgundy end.

Mashad Weaving and Quality

Mashad sits in Khorasan, in the northeast of Persia, and it has long been the weaving capital of that province, a pilgrimage city with the commercial scale to support real workshops rather than scattered village looms. That shows here in the symmetry: a 13 foot length holds its medallion dead center, the borders turn cleanly at all 4 corners, and the floral lattice repeats without the drift you get when a weaver is working from memory instead of a drawn cartoon. Khorasan wool is long stapled and takes dye deeply, which is why these reds and indigos stay vivid instead of going dusty, and the 3/8" pile has enough body to wear for decades under furniture. A signed piece from Mashad means a workshop piece, made under a master's name and checked before it came off the loom, and the signature is the single best clue to that. The 1980s date puts it in the generation of Mashad weaving that still used good handspun wool and traditional dye practice, and the pile, fringe and selvedges here are all intact and unrestored.