9'8" x 13' Persian Kerman Rug | Signed Cartouche | Ruby Red Floral Field with Navy Border

This is a workshop piece, and the weaver left his name on it: a small ivory cartouche is knotted into the upper border, the mark of a named shop rather than an anonymous village loom. The rug measures 9'8" x 13', a true room size that sits comfortably in the family of 10x13 Persian rugs, with a 3/8" wool pile on a cotton foundation and an even, unworn surface from edge to edge. The drawing is dense and disciplined, thousands of small flower heads and curling vines laid over a ruby red ground, with a soft sky blue open field breaking the corners and a deep navy main border holding it all together. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity recording size, materials, origin and construction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a lobed medallion built in three layers: a navy outer shell cut with hooked cloud-band lobes, an ivory inner cartouche, and at the heart a sky blue rosette surrounded by small pink and green buds. Two slender pendants run north and south off the medallion into the field. Around it the red ground is filled corner to corner with an all-over floral system, curling arabesque vines carrying rose heads, tiny palmettes, tulip shapes and serrated leaves, none of it left empty and none of it repeated so mechanically that the eye stops moving. The 4 corners are drawn as large pale blue and ivory spandrels filled with the same vine work at a bigger scale, which gives the red field its distinct 8 lobed silhouette. The border scheme runs wide: a navy main band of linked palmettes and flowering vine, framed inside and out by pink and ivory guard stripes carrying a running rosette repeat, the sort of pictorial garden framing that Kerman weavers are known for.

Color and Palette

The field is a deep ruby red that reads almost wine colored in low light and warms toward cherry where the light catches the pile. Against it the floral tracery is worked mostly in ivory and cream, which is what makes the pattern legible across a room rather than muddy. The blues do the structural work: a strong navy, close to indigo, in the outer medallion shell and the main border, and a much lighter powder blue in the spandrels and in hundreds of individual flower heads scattered through the field. Rose pink appears in the guard stripes and in the larger blossoms, sage and olive green in the leaves and stems, and small touches of honey beige and soft brown give the older, settled look you want in a red and blue Persian rug. The overall effect is not loud. Red is the ground note, navy is the frame, and the ivory and pale blue keep it light.

Kerman Origin and Weaving Quality

Kerman sits in southeast Persia and has produced city rugs for centuries, with the best pieces coming out of small named workshops where a designer drew the cartoon and the weavers followed it knot for knot. That workshop discipline is visible here in the way the curved vines hold their line through the corners and the way the border repeat lands cleanly at the ends. The back photograph shows a fine, tight, regular knotting with straight rows and no pulling, on a cotton warp and weft that gives the rug the body to lie flat and take furniture without rippling. The pile is soft, slightly lustrous wool, cropped low enough to keep the small floral detail crisp. A woven cartouche like the one in the upper border is one of the first things a specialist looks for when trying to date an Oriental rug and place it with a shop, and it is the reason a signed piece in this condition is worth more than an unsigned one of the same size.