9'8" x 12'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | All Over Vase and Bird Design | Fine Wool, Excellent Condition

This is a full room size Persian Tabriz rug woven in northwest Persia, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands up straight across the whole field. The drawing is the classic Tabriz vase repeat: rows of flowering urns, paired birds and rosettes marching up a clear red ground, framed by a wide navy main border and matching navy outer band. At 9'8" x 12'7" it covers a standard living or dining room wall to wall, and it sits squarely in the most useful of all 10x13 Persian rug sizes. Condition is excellent with no repairs, no low spots and original ends and sides, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all over vase design, one of the oldest Tabriz repeats and one of the hardest to keep honest over 12 feet of length. Footed urns alternate in offset rows, each one sprouting a spray of carnations, tulips and 8 petal rosettes, with slender long tailed birds perched on either side of the taller vases and small cypress-like leaf fans rising between them. Look closely at the close-up photograph and you can see that no two adjacent urns carry the same palette: one is drawn in deep green, the next in navy with an ivory lip, the next in sky blue outlined in black. The repeat is drawn on a diagonal grid so the eye reads movement rather than a static grid, and the weaver held the spacing steady right up to the border line. Three borders enclose the field: a narrow ivory vine stripe, a wide navy main border filled with alternating palmettes and small gabled vessels, and an outer ivory band of meandering leaf and rosette. The corners resolve cleanly, which on a repeating field pattern is the clearest sign of a properly cartooned city weave.

A Red Field Framed in Deep Navy

The ground is a saturated true red with a faint raspberry cast where the light catches the pile, clear and even from end to end rather than the brick or rust tone many large Persian rugs fall into. Against it the main border reads deep indigo navy, almost black in the shaded corner shots and clearly blue where the rug is photographed in daylight, and the contrast between the two is what gives the piece its formal, framed look. The detail work is where the color really opens up: ivory and cream do most of the outlining and keep every vase legible, then bottle green, teal, sky blue, rose pink, soft apricot, marigold gold and small touches of aubergine and black fill the urns, blossoms and birds. Because those accents are scattered in small quantities across the whole surface, the rug pulls in almost any wall color, and it will sit comfortably with both warm wood tones and cool greys.

Tabriz Weaving and Quality

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving city for centuries, working from drawn cartoons in proper workshops rather than from memory. Fineness there is measured in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in, which is why Tabriz rugs hold a level of drawing that village looms cannot match on a repeating pattern of this scale. This piece is a solid workshop-grade weave: the back photograph shows tight, even rows of knots on a cotton foundation with no pulling or slack, and the wool has the dry, springy handle of good northwest Persian fleece that wears for decades rather than matting down. The 3/8" pile height is ideal for a heavily used room, low enough to vacuum and move furniture across, deep enough to stay soft underfoot. For a 9'8" x 12'7" rug in excellent, never used condition, that combination of drawing discipline and honest wool quality is exactly what collectors of hand-knotted wool rugs look for.