9'9" x 13'5" Persian Kashan Rug | Red Field Floral Medallion | Signed Cartouche

This is a full room size piece in the classic town formula, 9'9" x 13'5" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, with a deep red field, a navy main border and an ivory medallion at dead center. It falls squarely in the 10x13 Persian rug class that most formal living rooms and dining rooms are built around. What lifts it above the ordinary is the cartouche woven into the border, visible in the detail photo: a signed rug is a workshop rug, drawn on paper by a designer and executed by a named weaver rather than copied from memory. Read more about the tradition in our guide to Persian Kashan rugs. The pile is a full 3/8" with no wear, no repairs and no low spots, and every rug we ship travels with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is textbook curvilinear Kashan. A stepped, lobed medallion sits at center with an ivory core holding a small blue and rose rosette, ringed by a navy band of palmettes and hooked tendrils, and it sends a tall pendant finial toward each end. The field around it never rests: rosettes, lotus blossoms, split palmettes and slender serrated leaves run on thin vines in every direction, each blossom outlined so the pattern reads clearly instead of blurring into the red. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the medallion's navy ground and carry paler ivory and sky blue flowers that pick up the light. The main border works alternating palmettes and eight petal rosettes linked by a continuous meandering vine, flanked on both sides by ivory guard stripes of small red rosettes paired with blue leaf forms, then finer minor stripes that frame the whole thing. The signature cartouche interrupts the border on one end, set on a green and ivory ground in Persian script, the maker's mark at the edge of his own work.

A Deep Red Field Against Navy and Ivory

The field is a warm cherry red that leans slightly toward tomato under daylight and deepens to garnet in lamplight, the kind of madder-family red that carries a room without shouting. Against it the navy of the border, medallion ring and spandrels reads almost black at a glance, then opens up into true indigo where the light hits the pile. Ivory does the work of separating the two: it fills the medallion core, runs through the guard stripes and turns up as tiny highlights in the blossoms, keeping the whole composition crisp. Green appears as an accent rather than a mass, in the leaf work and stems scattered across the field and again in the cartouche ground, with rose pink, soft saffron gold, camel and 2 shades of blue, one pale sky and one mid cornflower, filling out the flowers. The back shows the same clean color separation knot for knot, which is how you can tell the dyes are stable all the way through the pile.

Kashan and the Weave

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century. The town's reputation rests on soft, lustrous local wool and on the formula you see here: a red field, a navy lobed medallion, ivory spandrels and a border that never loses its rhythm. When you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor, which is as good a measure as any of how deeply this design has settled into the way people picture a fine rug. The weave in this example is tight and even, worked on a cotton warp and weft with a firm handle and a dense 3/8" wool pile that holds the small floral detail without crowding it. The back reads regular from selvage to selvage with no pulls or crooked rows, the fringes are original and intact, and the signed cartouche confirms this came off a proper workshop loom rather than a village one.