9'9" x 13' Persian Tabriz Rug | Red Floral Medallion | 1980's Wool Pile

A 9'9" x 13' room-size Tabriz from the 1980's, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation in northwest Persia and returned to us in excellent condition. The pile is still full and even across the field, the ivory cotton fringe is intact at both ends, and the back shown in the last photograph reads clean and tight with no repairs or reweaving. This is a true formal floor piece rather than an accent rug: it will seat a sofa and two chairs with pattern to spare, which puts it squarely among 10x13 Persian rugs rather than the smaller 9x12 group. It ships with our certificate of authenticity recording the weave, the materials and the Persian Tabriz origin.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Tabriz formula and then fills every inch of it. A navy lobed medallion sits dead center, scalloped and outlined in ivory, with an inner ivory cartouche holding curling arabesques around a small 8 petal rosette in sky blue. Four ivory corner spandrels answer it, each one drawn with a large serrated leaf and a curved paisley spray loaded with rosettes and bell flowers. Between medallion and corners the red field carries a complete all-over floral system: thin black vine stems, tiny white daisies, blue and gold blossoms, green serrated leaves and small flowering vase groups that rise toward each end of the rug. The navy main border alternates pink palmettes with ivory cresting blossom motifs on a connecting gold vine, and that border is locked in on both sides by olive guard stripes of linked leaf and rosette, with narrow reciprocal zigzag ribbons and a plain red outer edge finishing the rug.

A Cherry Red Field With Navy, Ivory and Olive

The ground is a bright cherry red that leans slightly toward raspberry under direct light, and the wool takes it with real luster, so the field shifts in tone as you walk around it. Against that red the medallion and the wide border are a deep ink navy, and ivory does the heavy structural work: the medallion outline, the 4 corner spandrels, the small daisies scattered through the field. The green in this rug is the interesting part, an olive to chartreuse used for the guard stripes and for the serrated leaves, warmer and more acid than the usual Tabriz green. Around those main tones the weaver worked in a long list of accents seen clearly in the close-up photographs: sky blue, rose pink, soft coral, teal, mustard gold, chocolate brown and small touches of grey and sage. Nothing is faded and there is no abrash streaking across the field.

Tabriz, Northwest Persia, and the Weave of This Rug

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the organizing city of Persian commercial weaving for centuries, the place where workshop cartoons, the Raj counting system and the discipline of curvilinear drawing were refined and then exported to the surrounding towns. A Tabriz of this generation is judged first on whether the medallion and spandrels are drawn with real control at scale, and on a field this large that is the hard part. Here the medallion is symmetrical end to end, the vine scroll repeats cleanly on both sides of the center line, and the border motifs turn the 4 corners without the crowding or improvised filler you see on lesser village copies. The pile is a firm, springy local wool clipped at a medium height, which is why a 1980's rug from a busy household still shows even depth, and the cotton foundation gives it the flat, true lie you want in a 13 foot length. This is the sort of honest workshop-grade Tabriz that sold well in its own day and holds value because the materials and the drawing were right from the loom.