Isfahan Rugs

Isfahan wove for the Safavid court, then stopped for most of two centuries, then started again. What came back in the twentieth century was workshop weaving aimed at the top of the scale: a wool pile outlined in silk, knotted on silk warps, drawn from a cartoon by people who do this and nothing else. The fineness is the point. So is the formality.

A city that stopped weaving

Isfahan was the Safavid capital from the end of the sixteenth century, and the court workshops there produced some of the most ambitious carpets ever made. The dynasty fell to an Afghan siege in 1722 and the workshops went with it. For roughly two hundred years the city wove very little that anyone troubled to record. What is sold as Isfahan today comes out of a revival that gathered pace from the 1920s onward, rebuilt by a small number of workshop families who went back to the Safavid drawings rather than inventing a new vocabulary. That gap is worth knowing when you read the design. An Isfahan rug quotes court work. It does not descend from it in an unbroken line.

Silk underneath, wool on top

The construction is the real signature of the type. Most fine Isfahan rugs are knotted on silk warps, usually with cotton wefts, using the asymmetric knot. Silk warps are thin and strong, so the weaver can set more knots into the same width, and the finished rug is light, supple and thin for its quality. The pile itself is wool. Silk then appears again on the surface as an outline, a single line of it around a palmette or a leaf, catching the light against a matt ground. An all-silk Isfahan exists and behaves like silk rather than like this, while the standard mixed construction is what the trade files under wool and silk. The fringe at each end is the warp itself, so on a silk-warp rug the fringe is silk, and it is the first part of the rug to suffer.

Shah abbasi, and the vase

The design repertoire is narrow and deep. The commonest field is the shah abbasi: large palmettes linked by a scrolling vine, named for Shah Abbas I, drawn either all over the ground or around a central medallion with cartouche borders. The vase design, another Safavid inheritance, runs a lattice across the field with vessels of flowers set into it. Tree of life fields, hunting fields and single prayer arches all appear. None of it pretends to be new. This is traditional drawing executed at a fineness that lets a curve be a curve instead of a staircase of knots, which is the practical difference between Isfahan and the geometric weaving of the north-west.

The name in the cartouche

Isfahan is one of the few places where signing a rug is normal. A small cartouche, usually at one end of the field or set into the border, carries the name of the workshop master in Persian script. The Seirafian family is the best known of those names, and there are others. A signature tells you which workshop claimed the piece, and that is all it tells you. Names have been copied onto rugs that never came near the loom in question, and an unsigned rug from a serious workshop will beat a signed one from a careless workshop every time. Read the wool, the drawing and the back first. Read the cartouche last.

Where an Isfahan should not go

This is a short-piled, finely knotted rug on a delicate foundation, and grit is its enemy. Sand and street dirt work down to the base of the pile and cut the knots from underneath, and fine knotting has less material to spare than coarse knotting does. So an Isfahan is wrong in a hallway, wrong inside a front door, and wrong under a dining table where chairs are dragged twice a day. It is right in a sitting room, a study, a bedroom, or on a wall. For the rooms that take punishment the honest answer is a coarser wool rug: a Heriz will absorb years of traffic, and a Bijar will outlast the floor it sits on.

Against the other fine cities

Four Persian names sit at this end of the market and they are not interchangeable. Nain works in a pale palette of ivory and soft blue and reads quiet across a room. Qom leans on silk and on colour that shifts as you walk past it. Kashan is heavier, redder and more solidly built. Tabriz covers the whole ladder from coarse to exhibition fine under one city name. Isfahan is the most consistently formal of the four, and the most consistently fine. Its usual grounds are madder red and ivory, and most of what was woven falls in the six by nine to eight by ten range or smaller, because a rug this fine takes years per square metre and very large ones are uncommon anywhere in Persian weaving.