9'7" x 13'5" Persian Mashad Rug | Signed Floral Medallion on Burgundy | 1980s, Perfect Condition

At 9'7" x 13'5" this is a full room piece, one of the classic proportions among 10 x 13 Persian rugs, hand-knotted in the 1980s in fine natural wool on a cotton foundation. It is a signed piece: a woven cartouche sits in the ivory border, the mark of a named workshop rather than an anonymous commercial run, and it is the reason signed Persian Mashad rugs hold their value the way they do. The pile is full and even from selvedge to selvedge with no thin areas, the ends are intact, and the wool still carries the soft sheen you can see wherever the light rakes across the surface. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

A navy lobed medallion holds the center, drawn in about 16 scalloped points with an ivory and rust core, a single pink rosette at its heart and small mirrored blossoms radiating outward. Slender pendants reach off the top and bottom, and the same navy reappears in the 4 corner spandrels so the layout reads as one continuous composition rather than a medallion dropped onto a plain field. Around it the field is filled edge to edge with an all-over floral: shah abbasi palmettes, curling boteh paisleys, split leaves and fine arabesque vines that loop back on themselves without ever repeating in an obvious grid. The main border runs a navy ground of large palmettes and rosettes on a cream vine, flanked by narrow guard stripes of small rosettes on sky blue. The drawing is curvilinear throughout, with the leaf tips and vine scrolls resolving cleanly, which is what separates workshop Mashad work from village copies of the same layout.

A Burgundy Field Lit by Navy, Sky Blue and Ivory

The field is a deep burgundy with a raspberry cast, saturated rather than dark, and it holds its tone from one end of the rug to the other. Against it the palette is unusually lively for a formal Persian layout: ivory and cream outline nearly every flowerhead, sky blue and a cooler turquoise fill the smaller petals, olive and moss green run through the leaves and vine tips, and rose pink shows up in the rosette centers and in the medallion itself. The navy of the medallion, spandrels and main border is almost black in low light and opens up to true indigo where the light hits it, which gives the rug real depth in a large room. A warm rust red sits inside the medallion core as a third accent. Together the burgundy ground with navy anchors and ivory highlights make this a rug that reads rich from across the room and detailed from 3 feet away.

Woven in Mashad, Khorasan

Mashad sits in Khorasan in the northeast of Persia, a pilgrimage city with a long workshop tradition and access to the excellent long-staple wool of the province. That wool is the reason Mashad pieces age the way they do: the fiber takes dye deeply and burnishes with use instead of dulling. A signed Mashad means a workshop piece, woven from a full cartoon under a master's name with the drawing checked as the rug came up the loom, and you can see the discipline in the symmetry of the spandrels and the even beat of the weft across 9'7" of width. The back shows a tight, regular knot with clear definition of every motif, and the handle is firm but supple, heavy enough to lie flat without slipping. This is the kind of large 1980s Persian rug that was woven to furnish a formal room for a generation and has barely started its working life.