12'9" x 18'1" Antique Persian Kermanshah Rug | Oversize | Brick Red Medallion on Navy | Circa 1920s

The condition is what stops you first. This rug is roughly a century old, it covers 230 square feet, and the pile still stands at a full 3/8 inch with no thin spots, no repairs and no restoration anywhere in it. That combination is rare enough on a small antique. On something 18 feet long it is close to unheard of, because rugs this size lived in rooms that were used, and almost all of them show it. Woven in Kermanshah in the 1920s at 180 to 200 knots per square inch, wool on cotton, this one somehow escaped that. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a brick red star medallion, filled edge to edge with its own miniature vine and blossom work and wrapped in a wide cusped ivory frame that pushes outward in lobes and points. Tall ivory pendants run off it top and bottom, reaching most of the way to the ends of the field. Behind all of that the field is dark navy, almost black at a distance, and it turns at each corner into large ivory spandrel forms carrying their own cartouches and floral sprays. Then the rug does something unusual: instead of one main border it runs 9 separate bands stacked one inside the next. A broad apricot-gold band frames the field first, then the sequence alternates navy, ivory, madder red and back again, each band with an independent repeat, some rosettes, some palmette and vine, some narrow guard stripes of scrolling meander. The outer 3 feet becomes a composition in its own right, and the apricot band does the critical work of separating the dark field from the busier bands beyond it so the medallion still reads from across a room.

The Color

This is a warm rug with a dark heart. Add up the surface and brick red, ivory and apricot-gold cover far more of it than anything else, between the medallion, the wide inner band and the 2 broad red border bands, so the piece reads warm from any distance. The navy is concentrated in the field around the medallion and in the guard bands, and it functions as the anchor, the thing that makes the reds glow instead of going muddy. A century of natural dye aging has softened the red toward terracotta at the medallion center while leaving the border reds deeper, and that difference between the 2 reds is one of the tells that these are true vegetable dyes. Ivory and cream do all the outlining. The smaller accents fill in from there, sky blue, olive green, a clear orange and a warm brick in the individual blossoms. Look at the pile close up and you can see slight variation inside single color areas, the natural result of small dye lots being used up and remixed as the weaving progressed. That is not a flaw, it is the fingerprint of hand dyeing.

Kermanshah and Western Persian Weaving

Kermanshah is a city in the mountains of western Persia, the historic heart of the Kurdish weaving regions, and in the antique trade its name has always signaled the upper grade of what came out of that area rather than one narrow village style. There is a practical reason for the reputation. The flocks in those highlands produce a long, resilient, high-lanolin fleece, and wool like that takes natural dye deeply and resists crushing under decades of use, which is exactly why a rug woven there in the 1920s can still show a full pile today. The weaving tradition across the region favors the asymmetrical knot, which allows the curved medallion and flowing vine drawing you see here rather than the angular geometry of the smaller tribal pieces from the same mountains. Pair that with the scale of this commission and you get something that sits at the top of what western Persia produced in the period. Our article on dating an antique Persian rug explains what to look for, and the rest of our 12x18 Persian rugs are worth seeing alongside it.