9' x 12'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | Coral Tabataba Medallion | Birds, Trees and Deer | 1980's

Every so often a Tabriz comes through the warehouse that is simply happy to look at, and this is one of them. Woven in the 1980's on a cotton foundation with a hand-spun wool pile, the 9' x 12'7" format is a genuine room size piece that lands squarely in the range buyers shop when they look at 9x12 Persian rugs for a living room or dining room. The coral field is unusual for the city, far warmer and more open than the deep reds most Tabriz weavers default to, and it makes the pale green medallion read like a pool of water dropped into the middle of a garden. The pile is full and even, the selvedges are tight and the ends are original. It ships with our certificate of authenticity confirming origin, age, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the Tabataba layout: a single lobed central medallion with a small pendant at each end, quarter medallions in the 4 corners, and a field that is anything but empty. Look closely at the coral ground and it turns into a hunting garden. Deer walk in profile along the lower field, birds perch and take flight among the vine scrolls, and slender flowering trees rise from the base of the field on either side of the centre, their branches drawn in pale pink and cream against the orange. Rosettes, tulips, carnations and split-leaf arabesques fill the remaining ground in a dense curvilinear rhythm, the kind of flowing line that only holds together when the knot count is high enough to carry a curve. The medallion itself is a second garden in miniature, with a navy cartouche at its heart framed by a cream ground and small flowering sprays radiating outward. The ivory main border carries alternating floral bouquets and butterflies, flanked by narrow guard stripes of reciprocal barber-pole and dot-and-diamond bands that give the outer frame real depth.

A Coral Field with Pistachio Green and Ivory

The palette is the reason to own this one. The field sits between coral and soft salmon orange, warm and slightly faded in the best way, the kind of tone that flatters walnut, brass and cream upholstery rather than fighting them. Against it the medallion and the corner spandrel fills are a pale pistachio green, almost celadon, which is a rare and deliberate pairing in coral and rust colored rugs and the single thing that lifts this piece above ordinary Tabriz colouring. The main border and the wide spandrel ground are ivory shading into pale butter cream, so the rug frames itself in light instead of closing down at the edges. Inside the drawing the weaver used a full box of accents: deep navy blue in the medallion centre and scattered through the florals, olive and moss green in the leaves, chestnut brown in the vine outlines, dusty rose and blush pink in the border blossoms, and small flashes of brick red. The wool has a soft natural sheen, so the coral shifts a shade lighter or deeper depending on which way you walk around it.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the commercial and artistic centre of Persian weaving for longer than almost any other city. Its workshops are known for two things: draughtsmanship and consistency. Tabriz weavers work from a full cartoon on a cotton warp and weft, using the Turkish knot and a hooked tool that lets them build density quickly, and they measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches. This piece is a solidly woven workshop product rather than a commercial run: the knotting is even from one end to the other, the medallion is symmetrical, the curved outlines of the arabesques stay smooth through their whole sweep, and the animals in the field are drawn well enough to be identified at a glance. Scale matters too. Holding a single medallion composition together across 9' x 12'7" without the field going slack is a loom problem as much as a design problem, and this one holds. The wool from the region is famously durable, which is why 1980's Tabriz rugs of this quality still show full pile four decades on.