9'9" x 12'10" Persian Kashmar Rug | Vase & Medallion Design | Signed Cartouche, Excellent Condition

A signed town piece out of Khorasan, this 9'9" x 12'10" Persian Kashmar fills a room with a deep navy field, a red lobed medallion and four flowering vases set into the corners of the field. The wool pile is clipped to 3/8", low enough to keep the vine drawing sharp and heavy enough to lie dead flat under a dining table or a long sofa run. Condition is excellent: pile is full from corner to corner, the sides and ends are original, and nothing in the photographs shows repair, moth or abrash correction. An inscription cartouche is woven into the border, which on a rug of this scale usually means a named workshop loom rather than a household one. It arrives with our certificate of authenticity, and it lands in one of the most useful proportions in the house, which is exactly why clean 10x13 Persian rugs are the hardest size to find in good order.

Design and Motifs

The layout is a classic Kashmar garden composition rather than a plain medallion and corner design. At the center sits a red lobed medallion packed with ivory curling arabesques, and inside it a sky blue cartouche holds a 4 petal rosette worked in gold, green and blush. Around that, the navy field carries a pair of tall footed vases at the top and a second pair at the bottom, each spilling flowering sprays, with large serrated palmettes, split leaves and elongated boteh paisley pendants filling the space between them. The spandrels open into sky blue with white leafy vine, which makes the medallion read as if it is floating. The wide red main border alternates ivory cartouches of woven script with small footed urns and star flowers, and it is fenced by narrow guard stripes of meandering vine on sky blue and ivory. Every element is drawn in mirrored pairs along both axes, so the rug reads correctly from either end of the room.

A Red and Ivory Palette Set on Navy and Sky Blue

The dominant note is a warm madder red, deep and slightly cochineal in the main border and lighter, almost rose, across the medallion ground where the wool takes the light. Against it the field is a dark indigo navy, close to black where the pile lies away from the camera and clearly blue where it lies toward it, so the rug shifts tone through the day. Ivory does the drawing work: white vine, white outlines on the palmettes, ivory cartouches in the border, ivory arabesques in the medallion. Sky blue is the third color and the one that gives this piece its character, used for the spandrels, the guard stripes and the inner cartouche of the medallion, and it lifts what would otherwise be a heavy red and navy scheme. Smaller accents run through the flowers in olive green, rust orange, chocolate brown, camel gold and a soft blush pink. All of it is natural-toned rather than bright, so the rug sits happily with walnut and mahogany furniture, brass, and off-white or oatmeal walls.

Kashmar, Khorasan, and the Quality of the Weave

Kashmar is a weaving city in Khorasan, in the northeast corner of Persia, southwest of the great shrine city that gives its name to Persian Mashad rugs, and it works in that same regional tradition: cotton warp and weft, long-staple Khorasan wool, and large room-size formats woven for the export trade and for local households of means. Khorasan fleece is long and lustrous, which is why the red and navy here still have depth rather than a chalky surface after years of use. The back shown against the ruler is even and tightly packed, with clear straight rows and no pulled or slack areas, and the fine outlining in the vine work tells you the weavers had enough knots per square inch to draw a curve instead of stepping it. The woven cartouche in the border is the detail collectors look for, since Kashmar workshops signed only the pieces they were prepared to be judged on.