9'9" x 12'8" Persian Kashan Rug | Red Field, Black Border | Signed in the Border Cartouche

This 9'9" x 12'8" room-size piece is a textbook example of the classic persian Kashan rug: a deep red field, a black lobed medallion carrying an ivory center, and a wide black main border holding the whole composition together. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, cut low enough that the drawing stays crisp and the colors read clearly from across a room. A small woven cartouche sits in the blue outer border near one end, which is the weaver's own mark and the kind of detail that separates a workshop piece from an anonymous commercial one. Condition is excellent, with full even pile corner to corner and clean ivory fringe at both ends. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The layout follows the central Persian medallion formula with real discipline. At the center sits an ivory cartouche-shaped core holding a small turquoise and green rosette, ringed by rose and gold petal work, set inside a large black lobed medallion that is itself filled with fine curling vine. Slim pendant finials run off the medallion top and bottom into the field. Around all of it the red ground is covered edge to edge with palmettes, lanceolate leaves, split arabesques and small eight petal rosettes, drawn in a continuous scrolling rhythm rather than a repeating grid, so no two quarters of the field look identical. Black spandrels anchor the 4 corners with dense floral clusters. The border system is layered: a wide black main band of alternating palmettes and rosettes, flanked by blue guard stripes of turning vine, with narrow ivory and red ribbon stripes separating each register. Among the vine of one blue guard stripe the weaver set the signature cartouche, placed off-center the way these marks traditionally are.

The Red and Black Color Scheme in Detail

The field is a deep madder-toned red that shifts with the nap, reading cooler and darker along one direction and warmer and brighter along the other. Against it the black of the medallion, spandrels and main border is close to a true blue-black, which is what gives the rug its weight and keeps the red from looking loud. The relief colors do the real work: ivory and soft cream in the medallion core, the vine outlines and the narrow ribbon stripes; a clear mid blue in the guard stripes and in dozens of small rosettes scattered through the field; turquoise and sage green in the center flower and in the larger palmettes; and rose, salmon, apricot and old gold through the smaller blossoms. Look at the close-up photograph and you will count a dozen distinct tones inside a single palmette. The end result is a rug that reads as red and black from a doorway and as a many colored garden from a chair, which is exactly how a good Kashan is supposed to behave.

Kashan: The Town and the Weaving Quality

Kashan sits in central Persia north of Isfahan and carries a weaving tradition that runs back to the Safavid court workshops. The local wool is soft and lustrous, and Kashan weavers built their reputation on one formula executed better than anyone else: red field, lobed medallion, ivory relief, dense symmetrical floral drawing. It is the Persian rug most Americans picture without knowing the name, and it is the Shark Tank rug, since when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. The back photograph here shows a tight, regular knot with straight rows and no pulling, the sign of a well-tensioned loom and an experienced hand. At 9'9" x 12'8" it covers a standard dining set with chairs pulled out or floats a full seating group, and it belongs with the other 10x13 Persian rugs we carry for rooms of that scale.