9' x 11'9" Persian Hunting Rug | Animal Pictorial Field | Woven Poetry Cartouche Border

Hunting rugs are the pieces weavers made to show what they could actually draw, and this one carries the full program: gazelles, leopards, hounds and long-tailed birds running through a flowering red field, a navy star medallion at the center, and a border of cartouches filled with woven Persian script. It is hand-knotted in wool at a 3/8" pile on a cotton foundation, finished at 9' x 11'9", which places it squarely in the most usable of all room dimensions if you are shopping 9 x 12 Persian rugs. The pile is even from end to end, the fringes are original and intact, and the condition is excellent. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity that records the origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 point star medallion in deep navy, filled with ivory arabesques, curling cloud bands and small rose and pistachio blossoms around a gold and teal rosette at the core. From there the field opens into a scrolling vine system loaded with palmettes, lotus heads and serrated leaves, and threaded through that vine work is the hunt: spotted leopards mid-stride, running deer and gazelles, hounds, hares, pheasants and a pair of sinuous light blue dragons that coil through the ivory spandrels at each of the 4 corners. Small ivory vase and vessel motifs sit on the vertical axis above and below the medallion. The main border is the storyteller's register, alternating rose-red cartouches of woven Persian calligraphy with ivory rosette panels on navy ground, so the poem runs continuously around the rug. Guard stripes in sage green and ivory, each carrying a tight meander of paired blossoms, separate the border from the field.

A Brick Red Field Against Navy, Ivory and Sage

The ground color is a warm brick red with a faint terracotta cast, the kind of red that reads brighter under daylight and settles into something deeper under lamps in the evening. Against it, the navy of the medallion and main border is almost black in the shadows and clearly indigo where the light catches the pile, which is what gives the rug its depth from across a room. The drawing colors are where it gets interesting: powder and cornflower blue in the lotus palmettes and the dragons, soft rose pink in the smaller blossoms, ivory for the arabesques and the animal bodies, olive and sage green in the leafwork and guard stripes, and small hits of saffron gold and dark aubergine in the animals and rosette centers. The spandrels are ivory, which lightens the 4 corners and keeps the red from closing in. The overall palette is warm and traditional rather than pastel, and it sits comfortably on oak, walnut and stone flooring alike.

Persian Origin and Weaving Quality

Hand-knotted in Persia in the classical workshop manner, on a cotton warp and weft with a wool pile clipped low at 3/8". A hunting design cannot be woven from memory in the way a village geometric can, because animals, cursive script and curved vine scrolls all demand a fine, tightly packed knot and a cartoon drawn in advance by a designer. The reverse, shown against a tape measure in the last photograph, tells that story plainly: the knot nodes are small and regular, the pattern reads as sharply from the back as from the front, and the outlines of the leopards and dragons hold their curve without stepping. Low pile of this kind wears well under furniture and takes vacuuming without shedding character, and the calligraphy border marks the piece as a presentation weaving rather than a purely decorative floor covering.