17'7" x 18'3" Antique Persian Kerman Rug | Square Palace Size | Navy Star Medallion | Approx. 100 Years Old

A square Persian rug of nearly 18 feet on each side is not something a workshop produces speculatively. A loom that wide had to be built for the commission, the cartoon had to be drawn to resolve a star pattern in 4 directions instead of 2, and a team had to stay on it for years. This one came out of Kerman roughly a century ago at 200 to 220 knots per square inch, over 320 square feet of hand-knotted wool, and it survives with its full drawing and its color intact. Rugs of this size and shape from this period almost never come to market privately, and when they do they are usually institutional. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The square format forced a solution you rarely see. Instead of a single medallion with pendants running the long axis, the center holds a many-pointed star that radiates outward in all 4 directions, its core a small red and gold rosette ringed by concentric bands of sky blue and ivory tracery. From that star the design breaks into a lattice of panels: diamond and rectangular cartouches on sky blue grounds, each holding its own miniature flowering spray, set into a red framework and separated by ivory outlines. Between and behind the panels the navy field runs a continuous small-scale floral repeat, palmettes, rosettes and curling leaves worked so densely that the ground barely shows. The border is a deep red band of alternating palmettes and blue rosettes, held by sky blue and ivory guard stripes, and it repeats correctly around all 4 equal sides, which is the part that took the planning.

The Color

The field is a dark navy blue, close to indigo at the edges and nearly black where the pattern is densest, and it is the anchor for everything else. What makes this rug remarkable at close range is how much color the weavers put on top of that dark ground: sky blue in the cartouche panels and guard stripes, madder red through the border and the framework, ivory doing all the outlining, then rose, salmon, gold, sage green and a soft apricot filling the individual blossoms. Very few of those tones repeat in the same combination twice. From standing height the rug reads as a deep blue field with a luminous center. From 3 feet away it dissolves into hundreds of separately colored flowers. That shift between distances is the mark of natural dyes aged a century, softened just enough to sit together without any one color shouting.

Kerman and the Antique Weaving

Kerman sits in southeastern Persia and has woven continuously since the Safavid period, with its great commercial era running from the late 19th century into the 1930s, exactly when this rug was made. Kerman's advantage was its wool, unusually soft and lustrous from the local flocks, and a workshop tradition that could handle scale and curvilinear drawing at once. That is why the biggest antique Persian commissions, the ballroom and palace pieces, so often came from Kerman rather than from a village center. This piece belongs to that generation. If you want to understand how age is actually assessed in a rug like this, our article on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the evidence, and the rest of our oversize Persian rugs sit alongside it.