9'6" x 13'7" Persian Kashmar Rug | Signed Pictorial Medallion | Ivory Field, Rose Red Border

This is a storytelling rug, not a repeating pattern. At 9'6" x 13'7" the ivory ground carries a full pictorial program: a lone horseman riding out from a domed sanctuary framed by cypress trees, gazelles set in small cartouches, and rose bouquets drawn with the kind of shading that only a skilled workshop attempts. A woven cartouche in Persian script sits in the border, so the piece is signed, and it has been kept in excellent order with a full even 3/8" wool pile on a cotton foundation. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the origin, the materials and the hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a tall oval reserve showing a rider on horseback before an arcaded building with a dome, a line of cypress trees behind him and a stream in the foreground with swimming birds and scattered stones. Around that reserve the weaver has laid out a garden: paired gazelles facing one another in small ivory panels, standing cranes, peacock fans at the top and bottom of the field, urns and cartouches, and full blown roses in red and pink drawn petal by petal. The 4 corners of the field open into deep navy sky panels containing miniature landscapes, each with a hillside village, cypresses and a church-like tower, and that same idea repeats in the wide main border where landscape vignettes alternate with turtle-palmette scrollwork and grazing deer. Almost nothing on this rug is purely decorative filler, which is what separates a pictorial Kashmar from an ordinary floral piece and why it reads so well on a wall as well as on the floor.

A Multi Color Palette Anchored in Ivory and Rose Red

The field is ivory with a warm cream cast, and against it the drawing is done in an unusually wide range of shades: rose red and deep garnet in the roses, soft salmon pink, terracotta, pale sky blue, teal, sage and olive green, tan, chocolate brown, gold and ink navy. The main border is a clear brick rust red, which pulls the whole composition together and keeps the busy field from floating. The strongest contrast comes from the 4 navy sky panels, a saturated cobalt that frames the pale landscapes inside them and echoes the navy outlining used throughout the vine work. Because so many colors appear in small quantities, the rug behaves as a neutral multi color piece in a room rather than committing to one dominant tone, so it sits comfortably with cream walls, warm wood and either red or blue upholstery.

Kashmar Weaving in Khorasan

Kashmar sits in Khorasan, in the northeast of Persia, in the same weaving province that produced the better known Persian Mashad rugs, and the town built its reputation specifically on pictorial and hunting-scene work rather than on repeating medallions. That kind of drawing is demanding: a face, a horse's leg or the curve of a dome has to be built knot by knot from the cartoon, and a workshop only signs a piece it is prepared to be judged on. The wool here is the soft lustrous Khorasan type that takes dye cleanly, spun and knotted on a cotton foundation and clipped to a 3/8" pile that still shows the fine outlines crisply. As a signed, room-filling piece it belongs with the larger 10x14 Persian rugs we stock, and it is the sort of rug people keep for decades and then hand down.