9'7" x 12'9" Persian Kashmar Rug | Pictorial Garden & Persepolis Columns | 1970s Navy Field

Most Persian rugs of this scale ask you to admire a pattern. This 9'7" x 12'9" Kashmar asks you to read a picture. Woven in the 1970s in the Khorasan town of Kashmar, it lays out a walled pleasure garden across a deep indigo ground: colonnaded pavilions at both ends, water channels and fish pools, stags and ibex stepping through the field, birds facing one another over the medallion. The pile is dense, tightly clipped wool on a cotton foundation, and after 50 years it still stands full from selvedge to selvedge with no low areas or repairs. It sits naturally in the 10x13 Persian rugs class, which is the standard footprint for a full living room or a 10 chair dining table. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, age, materials and knotting.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a sky blue lobed medallion built around an 8 petal rosette, with a pair of facing birds below it and a lattice ground drawn in small crosshatched squares. Two large oval cartouches in camel and salmon flank it, each carrying a serpentine dragon curled around a column fragment, a motif the Kashmar designers borrowed from Achaemenid stone relief. Both ends of the field open into architectural panels: rows of fluted columns and stepped stairways, arched pavilions with blue pools and swimming fish, and a dark trellis wall drawn as a fine diamond grid. Scattered between them are stags, lions, gazelles and peacocks, all rendered in ivory and pink outline so they read clearly against the indigo. Cloud shaped crimson reserves in the 4 corners hold distant mountain and palace scenes. The main border is a raspberry ground carrying peach palmettes, boteh and split leaf arabesques, framed by a narrow salmon vine guard and an indigo outer band of tumbling leaves, finished with plain ivory fringe at both ends.

Color: Indigo Ground, Crimson Structure, Turquoise Light

The field is a true dark indigo, close to black in raking light and clearly blue when the sun hits it, which is what makes this one of the more forgiving navy blue Persian rugs to live with in a bright room. Against it the weaver ran two reds: a deep raspberry crimson that carries the border and the corner reserves, and a hotter magenta used in small strokes inside the garden scenes. Salmon and peach do the structural work, outlining the cartouches, the pavilion arches and the inner guard band so the architecture stays legible from across the room. Turquoise and mid sky blue light up the pools, the medallion ground and the small bird bodies, while camel, honey gold and soft brown fill the columns and stairways and give the whole thing an aged, sunlit tone. Ivory appears sparingly, in the animals, the rosette center and the fringe, which keeps the contrast sharp without turning the rug pale. The overall reading is dark and jewel toned rather than bright, and it anchors wood floors, leather and cream upholstery equally well.

Kashmar: Pictorial Weaving from Khorasan

Kashmar sits in Khorasan province in northeast Persia, in the same weaving region that produced Persian Mashad rugs, and it built its name in the middle of the 20th century on exactly this kind of narrative carpet. Where most workshops repeat a floral cartoon, Kashmar looms took on ruins, gardens, animals and figures, which demands a much more disciplined weaver: a column has to stay straight over 40 rows of knots and an animal has to keep its shape at small scale. The knotting here is a tight, even Persian knot on a cotton warp, with clipped low pile so the drawing stays crisp, and the two ends and both selvedges are original and secure. The wool is local Khorasan fleece, springy and high in lanolin, which is why a rug used for 50 years still has its full handle and a quiet sheen. Details like the mirrored cartouches and the balanced end panels show a workshop cartoon rather than a village improvisation, and pieces of this size in this condition come out of Kashmar far less often than the common 6x9 and 8x11 formats.