3'8" x 5'4" Persian Isfahan Rug | Red Flower Vase Design with Songbirds | Kork Wool and Silk on Silk | About 45 Years Old
A blue and white vase overflowing with peonies and carnations, songbirds perched in the branches around it, and an arched niche crowning the top: this 3'8" x 5'4" Persian Isfahan is a garden in miniature. It was woven around 1980 in kork wool and silk on a pure silk foundation, at 26 knots to the inch, roughly 680 to 700 knots per square inch. Some 45 years on, it has never been used. The pile is full, the colors are clean and the ivory fringe is intact. It is about as close to new as a vintage Isfahan of this quality comes, and it comes with our certificate of authenticity.
Design and Motifs
The composition reads from the bottom up, like a garden seen through a doorway. At the base, 2 stylized cloud forms sit in the lower corners, and a pair of long-tailed songbirds faces a peach sunburst palmette. Above them, a sky blue cartouche holds a lily flanked by 2 pomegranate blossoms. The centerpiece is the vase, blue and lavender with a scalloped body, sending up a full bouquet: a salmon peony at the top, 2 ivory carnations and sweeping gold-centered lilies. More birds perch among the stems, in teal, rose and dove grey. Fine gold tendrils knit the whole field together, threading through iris, star flowers, lavender blossoms and grey-green split-leaf arabesques, all mirrored precisely left to right. The top of the field rises into a mihrab-style arch outlined in blue, with a small sky blue palmette at its peak. In the apricot spandrels on either side, lattice-filled palmettes throw out feathery leaves among scattered bouquets. The main border is navy, alive with ivory and powder blue acanthus scrolls and pink peonies. It sits between 2 ivory guard stripes of slate grey leaf scrolls and raspberry rosettes, finished with a navy outer band.
The Colors: Deep Red, Navy and Apricot
The field is a deep, saturated red with a touch of warmth, like ripe cherry, and it holds its color evenly from end to end. Against it, the apricot of the arch spandrels and the narrow inner frame is the surprise in this rug: a soft peach-salmon that lifts the top of the design and glows against both the red and the navy. The navy border is almost midnight, dark enough to frame the field firmly while letting the ivory acanthus and pink peonies stand out sharply. The palette in between is wide. Sky blue and powder blue fill the cartouche and the vase. There is pink and raspberry in the peonies and rosettes, lavender and mauve in the smaller blossoms, and forest green, sage and olive in the leaves. Gold runs through the tendrils and the lily centers, and slate grey shades the arabesques and guard-stripe scrolls. The silk in the pile gives the lighter tones a soft sheen, most noticeable on the vase, the birds and the border scrolls. The fringe is the natural ivory of the silk foundation.
Isfahan Vase Design: A Garden Woven on Silk
The vase design has deep roots in Persian weaving, and Isfahan's workshops, heirs to the Safavid court tradition of the 16th century, turned it into one of their signature compositions. It is a demanding design. A vase, a bouquet and birds all need to be drawn as recognizable forms, not as stylized repeats, and that takes a very high knot count on a very fine foundation. That is what the best Isfahan rugs are built on. Silk warps are thin and strong, so knots pack tightly and the rug lies flat and square. Kork wool, taken from the neck and shoulders of the lamb, is soft and lustrous and takes dye beautifully. At 680 to 700 knots per square inch, this piece is near the top of what Isfahan weavers attempt. You can see it in the feathers of the birds, the ribbing of the vase and the veins of every leaf. A never-used Isfahan from around 1980 in this condition is a rare find. It deserves a place where it can be looked at closely, whether in a quiet room or framed on a wall.
