Kashan Rugs

When people picture a Persian rug without having seen one, they picture a Kashan: a central medallion, corner spandrels, a field of scrolling vine, madder red against indigo blue. The central Iranian city did not invent that scheme, but it standardised it and has woven it more consistently than anywhere else for well over a century. Kashan is the formal end of Persian weaving.

The pattern everyone means by Persian

The Kashan scheme is closed and complete: a medallion at the centre, a quarter of the same medallion repeated in each corner, and between them a field of fine scrolling vine, palmettes and split leaves, all enclosed by a main border with a guard stripe on either side. Nothing in it is accidental, and nothing in it is local. It is court design, drawn on paper by a designer, woven from that drawing by a workshop weaver. That is the difference between a Kashan and a village rug, and it is visible in the symmetry: the two halves of a Kashan match because they were meant to, not because the weaver had a good memory.

Madder, indigo, ivory

The palette is narrow and it is the point. A deep madder red ground with an indigo navy medallion, or the reverse, with undyed ivory carrying the vine and the outlines. Soft rose, pale blue and a restrained green appear inside the drawing. What does not appear is a wide range of hues at equal strength: Kashan builds depth by using few colours in many values rather than many colours side by side, which is exactly the opposite instinct to Bakhtiari weaving a hundred miles south.

Manchester wool, and a name the trade uses loosely

Kashan weaving as it exists now dates from a revival in the late nineteenth century, and one detail of that revival is worth knowing. The best rugs of the period were woven with fine merino wool imported through Manchester, and the trade still calls them Manchester Kashans. The wool was softer, longer-fibred and more even than local fleece, and it takes dye with a clarity that shows. The other name attached to the period is Mohtashem, used for the finest early revival Kashans. That attribution is applied with considerably more confidence than the evidence supports, and it should be treated as a quality description rather than a signature.

Construction

Kashan works on a cotton warp and weft with the asymmetrical knot, at a fineness high enough to draw a true curve. The pile is short to medium and clipped evenly. Silk Kashans are a real tradition rather than a modern novelty, and a silk one is a different rug with different limits, closer in behaviour to Qom or to silk generally. Most Kashans are wool, and a good wool one on cotton is a durable floor rug despite looking like a decorative object.

What formality asks of a room

A Kashan is not a flexible rug and pretending otherwise does nobody a favour. A closed medallion design wants to be seen whole, centred, with furniture off it or squarely on it, in a rectangular room. Put a sofa across one corner spandrel and the whole geometry goes wrong. It also insists on the right size. A medallion rug that is too small for its room does not read as understated, it reads as a mat with a target on it, and the rug is almost always too small. This is a design for six by nine to eight by ten and upward, in rectangular format. For an informal room, an all-over field is far more forgiving: Hamadan village weaving or a Heriz will take furniture anywhere.

Kashan among the city weaves

Central Iran produced several fine city traditions and they divide along clear lines. Isfahan is finer and more elaborate, with silk foundations at the top end. Nain is lighter in colour and younger by four centuries. Sarouk shares the drawing but sits heavier underfoot. Kashan is the middle of that group and the most conservative member of it: the rug that has changed least, and the standard against which the phrase traditional Persian is usually being measured. Within Persian weaving it is the default, in the useful sense of the word.