9'8" x 12'11" Persian Kashmar Rug | Navy Vase and Animal Pictorial Field | Signed Cartouche

This is the kind of Kashmar that rewards walking up close. From across the room it reads as a deep navy room-size piece with a soft blue medallion floating in the center, and one of the better 10x13 Persian rugs for a seating group that needs all four sofa legs on wool. Stand over it and the field breaks into small scenes: footed vases, covered bowls, blossoming urns, and slender animals and birds tucked between the vine scrolls. The weaver signed the work in a woven ivory cartouche at the top of the field, which is the mark of a named workshop rather than an anonymous commercial run. The 3/8" wool pile is even end to end with clean, straight selvages, and at 9'8" x 12'11" it is a genuine room size rather than a stretched 9x12. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is a vase and pictorial garden layout rather than a plain medallion and corner formula. A lobed central medallion sits on a densely scrolled navy field, with a single ornamented vase drawn inside it and cloud-band leaves radiating out to the points. Above and below, matching pendants carry their own vases, and the field itself is scattered with roughly a dozen vessels: footed compotes, lidded jars, ribbed bowls and small rosette-filled roundels, each outlined in ivory so it reads clearly against the dark ground. Between them run thousands of small red rosettes on thin vines, with deer, gazelles and perching birds worked in at the same scale, which is why the field never looks mechanical. Broad burgundy palmette arabesques fill the 4 corners and meet a serrated inner guard. The main border is the signature element: an ivory ground carrying an alternating procession of urns, amphorae and ornamental vases separated by small floral cartouches, framed by narrow rust and navy guard stripes.

A Navy Ground With Burgundy, Rust and Ivory

The field is a deep midnight navy, dark enough at a distance to read almost black, which is what makes this piece work as one of the easier navy blue Persian rugs to live with in a bright room. Over it the vine work is drawn in madder red and clear burgundy, so the surface shimmers between blue and wine depending on where you stand. The medallion breaks that scheme deliberately: it is a pale, almost powder blue, ringed in rust and filled with coral and salmon florals, and it lifts the center of the rug the way a skylight lifts a dark hall. Warm rust and burnt orange carry through the corner arabesques and the smaller vessels, with olive green, soft pink, mustard and small notes of chocolate brown used sparingly inside the flowers. Ivory does the structural work, outlining every vase, running the full main border and lighting the field edges, and the whole palette reads as burgundy and navy with ivory relief.

Kashmar Weaving in Khorasan

Kashmar is a town in Khorasan, in the northeast of Persia, about 130 miles southwest of Mashad, and it weaves in the same regional tradition as the larger city. Where village looms in that province often stay geometric, Kashmar workshops built their reputation on curvilinear pictorial work: vase panels, garden scenes, hunting fields and portrait rugs, drawn on paper cartoons and worked in the soft, long-staple Khorasan wool that takes madder and indigo so well. The relationship to Persian Mashad rugs is close, and collectors often shelve the two together. What separates a workshop piece like this one from ordinary market goods is the discipline of the drawing at this scale, holding a fine vine scroll steady across nearly 13 feet of length, keeping the 4 corner arabesques symmetrical, and getting the border vases to turn each corner cleanly. A signed cartouche says the weaver was willing to put a name to that work.