9'8" x 13' Persian Kashan Rug | All Over Floral on Soft Blue Field | Signed Workshop Piece

A signed room size piece, this 9'8" x 13' Kashan is knotted in fine wool on a cotton foundation and carries a small woven cartouche at the top of the border, the weaver's name in Persian script. The drawing is what sells it. Where lesser Persian Kashan rugs fill the field with a repeating stamp, this one keeps a living, hand drawn rhythm across nearly 126 square feet, with every palmette slightly its own. The pile is full and even end to end, the sides and ends are intact, and the back reads tight and regular under the ruler. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is a continuous arabesque lattice: thin navy vines loop from one blossom to the next, opening into broad palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, cusped lotus heads and long serrated leaves that curl back on themselves. At the center the vine work tightens into a faintly drawn lobed medallion with pendant finials above and below, more implied than outlined, so the pattern reads as one unbroken garden rather than a medallion sitting on a background. The 4 corners repeat that logic, the spandrel drawing dissolving into the field instead of being cut off by a hard edge. Framing it all is a wide main border of alternating palmettes and turned leaf forms on a lighter ground, braced by narrow guard stripes of running vine and reciprocal trefoil, 5 bands in total from field to fringe. That density and symmetry is exactly why 10x13 Persian rugs in this drawing sit so well under a long dining table or a full seating group, since chair legs and sofa fronts never interrupt a single focal point.

A Study in Blue: Navy Drawing on a Soft Pale Ground

Navy blue does the structural work here. Every vine, every leaf outline and the heart of most palmettes is drawn in a deep inky navy that holds the pattern together from across the room. Against it the weaver stacked at least 3 lighter blues, a mid cornflower, a powder blue and a pale ice tone that also serves as the field ground, so the eye keeps finding gradation where cheaper weaving would give one flat color. The open ground itself reads as a soft washed blue in daylight and warms toward ivory and cream where the pile catches the light, which is why the close-up photographs look considerably warmer than the full views. Accents are used with restraint: olive gold in the leaf tips, warm rust and terracotta in the outer petals, a scattering of brick red dots at the flower centers, and quiet seafoam green in the border rosettes. The result belongs firmly with navy blue Persian rugs while staying far lighter and cooler on the floor than a classic red ground Kashan.

Kashan: The Town and the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops that produced some of the most copied designs in the history of the craft. Local wool is soft and unusually lustrous, which is why a Kashan gains sheen rather than looking dull as it is walked on. It is also the most recognizable Persian rug in American rooms: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. The signature cartouche matters, because in Kashan a signed rug is a workshop rug, woven to a master's cartoon with a named weaver willing to put his name in the border. The back of this piece supports that, showing small, square, tightly packed knots on a cotton warp, dense enough to hold the fine curved line of the vine scroll without the pattern breaking into steps, and heavy enough in the hand to lie flat and take decades of traffic.