10'11" x 17'11" Persian Kashan Rug | Ivory All-Over Floral Field | Oversize Wool Pile

This is a genuine palace scale piece, 10'11" x 17'11" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, drawn in the classic all-over manner of Persian Kashan rugs. Instead of the familiar single medallion, the weaver ran an uninterrupted lattice of vine and blossom from selvedge to selvedge, which is the harder drawing job and the reason a rug this long still reads as one continuous composition rather than a repeated block. The pile is a full 3/8", dense and even underfoot, and the rug lies flat with straight sides and clean, original ends. At nearly 18 feet it belongs with the truly oversize Persian rugs that fill a great room or a long formal salon in a single sweep. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is built on a system of curving arabesque vines that loop into wide ogival compartments, each one anchored by a rosette or a lobed palmette. The largest rosettes are drawn as 8 petal and 12 petal blooms with layered outlines, so a single flower carries three or four separate colors before the outline closes. Between them the weaver filled the ground with small serrated saz leaves, split palmettes, tiny five point stars and scattered buds, leaving almost no empty wool but never crowding the drawing. The corners resolve cleanly, which on an all-over field of this length is the real test of the cartoon. Framing it all is a wide ivory main border of alternating palmettes and cusped floral cartouches, set between narrow guard stripes of running vine and a delicate meander at the outer edge. Four guard bands in total step the eye in from the selvedge to the field.

The Ivory Ground and Its Color Palette

The ground is ivory with a faint cream and oyster cast, the kind of pale field that lifts a dark floor and makes a large room feel wider than it is. Over it the drawing works in two blues that do most of the structural work: a deep inky navy for the vine outlines and the dark rosette centers, and a soft cornflower blue for the petal fans and the smaller blossoms. Warmth comes from rust and copper brown, used in the curling leaves, the small arrow buds and several of the larger flower hearts, with touches of soft gold and mustard in the palmette centers. A muted sage green appears in a handful of blossoms and leaf tips, and clean white highlights sit at the petal edges to keep the flowers reading crisply against the ivory. The main border repeats the same range on a slightly creamier ground, so the frame relates to the field rather than competing with it. It is a quiet, light, formal palette that sits comfortably with both antique furniture and a restrained modern interior.

Kashan Weaving in Central Persia

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its looms trace back to the Safavid court workshops. The town built its reputation on soft, lustrous local wool and on disciplined city drawing, and the classic Kashan formula of a red field with a navy lobed medallion is the version most people picture. When you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. This rug is the workshop's other face, the pale all-over layout that Kashan weavers reserve for their largest commissions, where a medallion would simply be lost across 18 feet. The knotting is fine and consistent, the wool has the characteristic Kashan sheen where the light catches the pile, and the density of the weave is what allows the small filler motifs to stay legible. Weaving a piece this size on a single loom takes a team and several years, and rugs of this scale in excellent condition come to market rarely.