9'8" x 13'1" Persian Kashmar Rug | Wool | Multi-Colour

A pictorial garden carpet knotted in Persia to the Kashmar design, measuring 9'8" x 13'1" with a 3/8" wool pile. The field is divided into rows of small ivory panels, each one holding its own scene: a flowering tree, a tiled house, a stream with fish in it, a deer or a lion. Seen from across a room it reads as a warm ivory surface latticed in red; up close it is a few hundred separate pictures.

Design

The rectangular field is set out as a walled garden seen from above, cut into roughly eighty compartments by narrow bands of red diamond lattice. Willows, cypresses, blossoming fruit trees and vine trellises fill most panels, with domed and tiled buildings along the lower edge of each and animals below them: grazing deer, cattle, seated lions, birds in the branches and ducks and fish in bands of blue water. Four larger scalloped cartouches break the grid at the centre, two with lions on a hillside above a pond and two with recumbent beasts among cypresses and lamps. Between them sits the central panel, a blue dome flanked by minarets, pine trees and hills, framed by a serrated leaf outline and a scatter of small red blossoms. The surround is a reciprocal sawtooth guard against a narrow navy outer band.

Colour

The grounds are undyed ivory to soft cream, and every panel division is drawn in madder red that shifts towards raspberry where the lattice thins. Against that sit indigo and a paler sky blue in the water and the central dome, olive and pine green in the foliage, apricot and rust orange on the lions, gold ochre in a few of the autumn trees, and grey-blue and dark brown in the animals and rooftops. The multi-colour effect comes from the accumulation of small areas rather than from any large block of colour, so the red grid and the ivory ground are what hold it together.

Making

Hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, with a short 3/8" pile that keeps the outlines of the figures legible, as the back view shows. A cartouche woven into the ivory end border carries an inscription in Persian script. The condition is recorded as excellent, and at this size it is one of the larger pieces in our hand-knotted stock.