9'7" x 13'5" Persian Kashmar Rug | Navy Vase & Animal Pictorial Field | 1970s Weave

This is a 1970s Persian Kashmar from the Khorasan province of northeast Persia, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and drawn in the old antique manner: a deep navy field crowded with vases, blossoming branches, songbirds and running gazelles, framed by an ivory border of urns and ewers. At 9'7" x 13'5" it covers a full formal room with seating on the rug, which puts it squarely in the range buyers search when they shop 10x13 Persian rugs. The pile is full and even across the whole surface with no repairs, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, age, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is the classic Kashmar vase and animal repertoire, laid out around a small lobed central medallion that holds a single footed urn and finishes top and bottom in slender pendants. Around it the field fills with objects rather than pure ornament: fluted vases, covered bowls, tall long-necked ewers, shallow footed cups and medallion cartouches enclosing paired birds. Between them run curling vines set with 6 petal rose blossoms, with white doves in flight, perched pheasants and small camel-gold gazelles leaping through the scrollwork. The corner spandrels are rose pink and filled with large serrated leaves and palmettes that arch inward over the field. The main border is the part that gives this rug its personality: an ivory ground standing an alternating parade of goblet-shaped urns, bottle vases and a broad ornamented amphora with scrolling reserves, each separated by small blue rosette sprays, then finished with a camel scrolling minor stripe and a red sawtooth outer guard against a navy selvage.

The Color: Navy, Rose and Ivory

The ground is a saturated indigo navy that reads almost black in low light and opens to a clear mid-blue where the wool catches the sun, visible in the angled photographs. Over it the vine work is carried in rose pink and a lighter blush that keeps the density from ever going heavy, with the vessels picked out in salmon, soft coral and cream. Camel gold does the structural work: it outlines the leaves, colors the animals and fills the scrolling minor border, which is what ties the navy interior to the ivory frame. Deeper notes come from olive green and dark walnut brown in the cartouches and in the large leaf forms at the field ends, and small strikes of turquoise and light sky blue appear inside the medallion and in a handful of the vases. The border ivory is a warm oatmeal rather than a bright white, the sort of ivory that only settles this way with age, and the paired rose pink spandrels give the rug its overall warmth on the floor.

Kashmar and the Khorasan Weaving Tradition

Kashmar is a town in Khorasan, the northeastern province of Persia whose weaving is anchored by the workshops of Persian Mashad rugs a few hours to the northeast. Kashmar weavers built their own reputation on pictorial and vase designs copied from antique court models, worked at a sturdy village-workshop knot count on a cotton foundation with the long-staple Khorasan wool that gives this pile its shine and its resistance to crushing. The finish here is honest workshop production of the 1970s: straight sides, squared corners, full pile and clean original ends, exactly the character you expect from a rug of this period rather than an antique, and anyone who wants to understand the visual cues behind that judgement can read our guide on how to date an oriental rug. Fifty years on, the wool has mellowed into the softened, slightly glazed surface that separates a genuine older Persian floor rug from anything woven last year.