9'7" x 12'8" Persian Kerman Rug | All Over Paisley Boteh on Ivory | 240 KPSI

This is a room size Persian Kerman woven entirely in the repeating boteh idiom, with no medallion at all: just an ivory field carrying rank upon rank of paisley figures from one end to the other. At 9'7" x 12'8" it covers a full seating group or a 10 seat table, and it belongs with the larger 10x13 Persian rugs that buyers shop when a 9x12 falls just short. The pile is fine wool on a cotton foundation at roughly 240 knots per square inch, which is well above ordinary village work and is what lets each little paisley keep its outline and its interior shading. The surface is even, the fringes and sides are sound, and the condition is excellent. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it is hand-knotted in Persia.

Design and Motifs

The field is a strict all over rug design built from the boteh, the teardrop with the bent tip that the West renamed paisley. The weaver set the motifs in offset rows so that the eye reads diagonals as well as horizontals, and each boteh is drawn twice over: a dark outline, an inner curl, and a small filling of stems and dots. Between the rows sit tiny four petal flowers and red berry clusters that keep the ground from reading as empty. The main border reverses the logic completely and goes fully floral, with scrolling vines, palmettes and rosettes swagged into a repeating arch, a cusped inner guard stripe of small blossoms, and an outer stripe of lancet leaves in blue. The corners are resolved cleanly, which on a repeating field of this size is the real test of the cartoon.

The Ivory, Green and Blue Palette

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached linen than to white, and it carries the whole rug. Against it the boteh bodies are worked in soft indigo and slate blue with cores of madder rose and dusty brick, so from standing height the field reads as a gentle grey blue on cream and only resolves into color when you kneel. Willow and sage greens run through the leafwork on both field and border, and the main border shifts to a pale sky blue ground that lifts the ivory beside it. Rose, salmon and a little terracotta appear in the border blossoms, with olive and moss in the vines. It is a light, dressed, distinctly Kerman palette rather than a saturated one, which makes it easy to live with in a room of pale walls, oak floors or antique furniture.

Kerman Weaving in Southeast Persia

Kerman sits in the high desert of southeast Persia and has been a weaving city for centuries, known for painterly drawing, pastel dye work and pictorial garden borders rather than for heavy geometry. Kerman weavers work on a vertical loom from a painted cartoon with an asymmetric knot, and the local wool takes light dyes cleanly, which is why the city's ivory grounds age so well. On this piece the roughly 240 knots per square inch shows in the boteh outlines and in the narrow guard stripes, where a coarser weave would smear the drawing into a blur. The back is tidy and regular, the knot rows sit straight, and the handle is supple rather than stiff, the mark of a well balanced workshop rug that has been kept out of heavy traffic.