9'6" x 13'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Field Floral Medallion | 1980s, Excellent Condition

This is a 1980s workshop Tabriz woven on a cotton foundation with a full wool pile, measuring 9'6" x 13'2" and drawn in the light, formal manner that Tabriz reserves for its ivory ground pieces. The field is an open warm ivory rather than the usual red, which makes the crimson and navy medallion read as the single focal point of the room and keeps a rug of this scale from feeling heavy. The pile is even from end to end, the fringe and selvages are intact, and the handle is supple, all of which places it comfortably in the group of 10x13 Persian rugs that are ready to go straight under furniture. Every rug we sell, this one included, ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, size and age.

Design and Motifs

The center carries a lobed crimson medallion built in 3 layers: an outer ring of scalloped rose red cartouches, an ivory inner frame filled with small rosettes, and a black-navy core holding a single 8 petal star flower. Navy pendants drop from the top and bottom of the medallion along the long axis, and matching navy palmette vignettes float at each side, so the composition reads clearly whether you stand at the end of the rug or walk across it. The ivory field between those anchors is filled with a continuous arabesque of split palmettes, curled saz leaves, cypress sprays and small birds, with a footed vase of flowers drawn at the base of the field just inside the border, a detail that tells you the cartoon came from a workshop and not from memory. Three borders frame the whole: a broad ivory main border of scrolling vine and shield palmettes, an inner and outer guard of small rosettes on blue, and a fine reciprocal stripe at the very edge. The drawing stays curvilinear the whole way around, with the corners resolved properly rather than cut off.

Ivory, Navy and Crimson: The Color Story

The ground is a soft ivory with a faint sand and champagne cast that warms under lamplight, and it is the reason this piece behaves like a light rug in a dark room. Against it, the medallion runs from a deep raspberry crimson through rose to a dusty salmon pink, ringed and pendanted in an inky midnight navy that reads almost black at the core. The florals scattered across the field bring in the full secondary palette: a clear mid blue, a cool teal, olive and moss green, chestnut brown, a pale peach and a few flashes of saffron orange that catch the eye on the vase and the border palmettes. There is no harsh contrast anywhere; every color is tempered by the ivory around it, which is exactly why buyers searching for ivory Persian rugs keep returning to this Tabriz formula. The close photographs show the slight, natural variation in the ivory wool, a sign of small dye lots rather than any fading.

Tabriz Weaving and What the Back Tells You

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving city for centuries, with designers, dyers and weavers working from drawn cartoons rather than village memory. Tabriz measures its own fineness in Raj, the count of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in, and the thing that separates a workshop Tabriz from a commercial one is whether the curved line holds at speed. On this rug it does: look at the reverse in the fold and measure photographs and the knot rows are straight, the nodes are small and regular, and the design is as legible from the back as from the front, which is the practical test for a hand-knotted piece. The wool is the tough, lustrous northwest fleece that takes decades of traffic without shedding its sheen, and the cotton foundation keeps a 13 foot length lying dead flat. If you want to understand how weavers, dealers and appraisers place a piece like this in the 1980s rather than the 1950s, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same evidence we used here.