9'9" x 12'10" Persian Mashad Rug | Burgundy Field, Navy Floral Borders | 1980s Khorasan Weave

This 9'9" x 12'10" rug was knotted in Khorasan, in the northeast of Persia, during the 1980s, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity stating origin, age, materials and measurements. It is a full room piece in the classic city formula: a deep burgundy field, a navy lobed medallion, navy corner spandrels and a wide navy main border, all worked in hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation at a 3/8" pile that still stands even from edge to edge. The drawing is characteristic of Persian Mashad rugs, generous in scale and curvilinear rather than angular, which is why this format reads so comfortably under a large sofa group or a 10 to 12 seat table. Buyers shopping 10x13 Persian rugs will recognise how few pieces of this age come through with sides, ends and pile all intact.

Design and Motifs

A lobed navy medallion sits dead centre, built up in concentric outlines of ivory, pale blue and olive green around an ivory cartouche that holds an 8 petal rosette in rose and coral. Pendant palmettes drop from the medallion at both ends, repeating the same shape in miniature. The field around it is a true all-over composition rather than open ground: slender vine tracery links rosettes, serrated boteh leaves, curled cloud-band leaves and small star flowers, with the drawing kept dense enough that the eye never runs out of detail. The 4 corner spandrels are navy and carry the same vocabulary in mirror image. The wide main border is the best part of the rug, a procession of large navy-ground palmettes and paisley boteh separated by scrolling stems, framed on both sides by ivory guard stripes of small rosettes and by narrow rose-red outer bands. Every repeat is drawn by hand, so no 2 palmettes in that border are quite identical.

A Burgundy Field Worked in Rose, Navy, Green and Ivory

The ground is a saturated burgundy with a raspberry cast, the kind of red that warms up under lamplight and goes deeper in daylight. Against it the navy of the medallion, spandrels and main border is so dark it is almost black where the pile falls away from the light, which is exactly what gives the composition its depth. The accents do the rest of the work: clear rose pink in the rosettes, a bright true blue in the vine scrolls and small flowerheads, olive and grass green in the leaves, a sharp orange that appears only in the flower centres and in the tiniest filler motifs, soft caramel brown in the larger palmettes, and chalk ivory in the guard borders and the rosette outlines. The ivory stripes are what keep a dark rug from reading heavy, drawing a bright line between field and border. Seen up close, the wool takes dye unevenly in the best way, with gentle tonal movement across the burgundy field rather than a flat printed-looking surface.

Mashad Weaving in Khorasan Province

Mashad is the great city of Khorasan in northeast Persia and a weaving centre whose workshops have long specialised in large room and salon sizes exactly like this one. The regional wool is long-stapled and lustrous, and local weavers traditionally leave the pile a little fuller than the fine central Persian towns do, which is why a Mashad holds its body and wears slowly under real furniture. The quality here is solid city workshop work rather than village weaving: the medallion is symmetrical end to end, the border turns the corners cleanly, and the curved vine stems flow without the stepping you see in geometric village rugs. Woven in the 1980s and never put under heavy use, it still shows full 3/8" pile, original selvages and original ends with the cotton warps bound and fringed, as the back-of-rug photograph shows.