9'8" x 12'4" Persian Mashad Rug | Red Floral Medallion | 1980s Sabzevar Weave

This is a full room-size Khorasan weaving from the 1980s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still carrying a deep, even pile with no thin areas anywhere across the field. It belongs to the family of Persian Mashad rugs woven in and around Sabzevar, west of the city, where the drawing stays curvilinear and the color sits on the vivid side of the Khorasan range. At 9'8" x 12'4" it covers a standard formal room without crowding it, which makes it one of the more practical pieces among our 9x12 Persian rugs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity stating origin, materials and knotting.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 petal rosette set inside a layered lobed medallion, ringed by heart shaped leaves and small palmettes, then opened out into a wide floral cartouche that reaches almost halfway across the width. Above and below the medallion sit long pendant finials filled with miniature blossom lattice, each capped by a vase form, and the remaining field carries flowering vine, serrated leaves and detached sprays drawn with the loose freehand curve typical of village workshops in the Mashad group. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the same vocabulary on a blue ground with cream outlining, so the field reads as one continuous garden rather than a medallion dropped onto empty ground. Three borders frame it: a navy main band of rosettes, curling cloud bands and flower heads, flanked by rust guard stripes with small repeating blossom and bracket motifs, and a narrow black and ivory meander that keeps the whole frame tight.

A Palette of Crimson, Indigo and Rust

The field is a saturated true crimson, the shade that makes classic red Persian rugs work under lamplight, and it deepens toward wine where the wool catches shadow in the angled photographs. Against it the drawing is carried mostly in two blues: a dark indigo for outlines, border ground and medallion core, and a lighter sky blue for the small blossoms and leaf clusters scattered across the field. Cream and ivory do the fine work, picking out the spandrel edges, the vase forms and the flower centers, while hot pink and salmon appear in the rosettes and in the border flower heads as the accent that keeps the red from going flat. Rust orange runs through both guard stripes and glows almost copper on the reverse. Small touches of olive and grass green sit in the leaves, and a little gold shows in the border bracket motifs. There is no abrash band or color break across the field.

Mashad, Sabzevar and the Khorasan Weave

Mashad sits in Khorasan in northeast Persia, the pilgrimage city whose workshops have supplied room-size floral carpeting for well over a century, with Sabzevar and the surrounding towns weaving to the same cartoons in slightly bolder color. The weave here is the Khorasan standard: a Persian knot on a cotton warp, a medium-heavy handle, and a pile left long enough to give the wool real body underfoot. The folded corner photograph shows a regular, well-packed back with the knot rows running straight, which is why a 40 year old piece like this still stands up to a dining table or a busy living room. Khorasan wool takes dye deeply and burnishes with use, and the sheen visible along the low angle shots is the result of four decades of exactly that.