9'9" x 13'3" Persian Tabriz Rug | Red All-Over Floral Field | Signed Cartouche | Excellent Condition

This is the drawing Tabriz built its name on, worked at room size and finished without a single shortcut. The 9'9" x 13'3" field is a deep true red covered edge to edge with an all-over floral system of palmettes, curling serrated leaves and thin vine scrolls, framed by a wide ivory main border and a run of narrow guard stripes. At the base of the field sits a small woven cartouche in Persian script, the weaver's own signature, which is the mark of a workshop piece rather than an anonymous commercial run. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, still full and even across the whole surface, and the rug is in excellent condition with no repairs, no low spots and clean straight selvedges. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction. Among 10x13 Persian rugs, a signed Tabriz in this state of preservation is the kind of piece that gets bought once and kept.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. Instead the weaver used a mirrored all-over floral design, a repeating lattice of large fan-shaped palmettes and lotus heads linked by hair-thin vines that curve rather than turn corners. Big feathered leaves sweep across the red ground between the blossoms, each one shaded through several tones so the leaf reads as if it is twisting in space. Small 8 petal rosettes and tiny paired buds fill the gaps, and the whole field repeats cleanly along both axes, which takes a properly drawn cartoon and a weaver disciplined enough to follow it across more than 13 feet. The ivory main border carries alternating rosette medallions and cloudband scrolls on the same curving vine, and the inner and outer guards step down to a fine reciprocal trefoil. Corners resolve exactly, with the border pattern meeting at all 4 corners instead of being cut off mid-motif.

Color: Deep Red Ground with Ivory, Rose and Soft Blue

The field is a saturated cherry red that holds its depth under both daylight and lamplight, and the close-up shots show the slight natural movement in the wool that separates a dyed pile from a printed one. Against it the weaver placed a palette that stays warm rather than harsh: ivory and cream for the vine work and the outlines, rose and salmon pink through the palmette petals, pale celadon and soft powder blue in the leaf shading, with gold and apricot used sparingly on the smaller leaves. Navy appears only in pinpoints, in the centers of rosettes and along motif outlines, where it gives the drawing its definition. The main border shifts the balance completely, putting all that red and pink detail onto an ivory ground so the eye reads a bright frame around a dark center. The signature cartouche picks up the brightest rose in the rug, a small deliberate accent at the foot of the field.

Tabriz: Weaving Town and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the commercial and technical center of Persian weaving for centuries, the town that revived the classical court repertoire in the 19th century and still measures fineness in Raj, the count of knots per gereh across the width. Tabriz weavers work on a cotton foundation with a hook tool, which is what allows them to hold a curved line cleanly across a large field like this one, and the town's workshops are judged on drawing before anything else. The reverse of this rug shows a tight, regular knot with straight rows and no pulled areas, and the 3/8" pile has been clipped low enough to keep the vine work legible. A signed cartouche, a corrected border and an all-over layout carried across 9'9" x 13'3" without drift all point to the same thing: a trained workshop hand rather than a village copy.