9'8" x 13'6" Persian Tabriz Rug | Signed Wool & Silk on Silk Foundation | 70 Raj

This is workshop weaving at the level Tabriz reserves for its best commissions: a 9'8" x 13'6" room size piece knotted at 70 Raj in wool and silk over a silk foundation, and signed by the workshop in a small woven cartouche at one end. The silk warp lets the drawing stay crisp at a scale where lesser rugs go soft, so the round starburst medallion reads cleanly from across a room and the vine work holds its line right into the corners. The pile is full, the colors are fresh, and the silk passes catch the light as you walk past. It falls squarely into the most useful of the large formats, sitting with our other 10 x 14 Persian rugs, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is an open ivory ground carried by a continuous lattice of thin scrolling vines, each one ending in a small blossom, palmette or split leaf. At the center sits a large round medallion built in concentric rings: a small rosette core, a band of stepped cartouches and tiny vases, then a ring of lobed petals that radiates outward into a 16 point starburst edged in fine outline knots. Two slender pendants rise and fall from the medallion on the long axis, each capped by a shield shaped cartouche. The 4 corners carry quarter spandrels drawn in the same vocabulary, heavier and darker than the field so the medallion stays the focus. The main border is a run of alternating cartouches and floral medallions, separated by narrow navy guard bands filled with reciprocal blossom and leaf work, with a fine outer stripe framing the whole. The end panel carries the woven signature, a small cartouche of Persian script that begins with the country name and continues with the workshop name.

A Palette of Ivory, Antique Rose and Garden Green

The ground is a warm ivory that leans toward champagne under lamplight rather than bright white, which keeps the rug easy to live with. Against it the medallion, spandrels and main border are worked in a dusty antique rose that deepens to burgundy where the outlines are drawn, a softer reading than the flat red most people expect from a Persian rug. Sage and celadon greens trace the vine work across the field and give the whole surface its cool undertone, while small accents of sky blue, midnight navy, saffron gold, terracotta and pale pink sit inside the individual blossoms. The guard borders are navy, nearly black, and they do the work of separating the rose border from the taupe outer band. Silk is used selectively, in the vine lines and in the highlights of the medallion petals, so those passages shift from pale to luminous depending on where you stand.

Tabriz Weaving and the 70 Raj Standard

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's most technically ambitious weaving city for centuries, measuring fineness by the Raj system: the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches. 40 Raj is commercial work, 50 is fine, 60 Raj is collector grade at roughly 400 knots per square inch, and 70 Raj is the ceiling of what only the best ateliers attempt, because the silk foundation and the tiny knot leave no room to hide a mistake. That density is what allows the curved arabesque and the radiating petal tips here to be drawn as true curves instead of stepped approximations. A woven signature confirms a named workshop stood behind the piece, which is standard practice on the finest Persian Tabriz rugs and rare on anything else.