4'10" x 7'9" Persian Nain 4La Rug | Signed Seyed Mohammadi | 900 KPSI Silk Foundation, Garden Panel Design
Four things make a Nain rare, and this 4'10" x 7'9" piece has all of them at once. It is a 4La, the finest grade the town has ever woven, at about 900 knots per square inch; it is knotted on a pure silk foundation rather than the cotton that even most 6La pieces use; it carries the woven signature of Seyed Mohammadi in the end border; and it is drawn in a garden panel design, a grid of 60 small compartments each with its own flower, tile or medallion, a layout almost never seen from Nain, whose workshops built their name on the medallion-and-spandrel formula. The pile is wool with silk worked through every outline and blossom, the ivory silk fringes are long and intact, one long side is bound in leather on the back, and the rug has never been on a floor. A certificate of authenticity from Rugs.net accompanies the rug.
Design and Motifs
The field is divided by sand-colored bands into a grid of panels, 5 across and 12 down, and no two neighbors are alike. At the center a taller panel holds a peach medallion: an 8-point star in teal and burgundy with an ivory rosette core, set on a peach ground of blue tulips and gray blossoms, framed by a lobed navy arabesque. The same peach and navy panel is repeated at the top and bottom of the field. Around them the compartments cycle through the whole Nain vocabulary: ivory panels with a single flowering bush of pink blossoms and teal leaves, navy panels with a peach and blue rosette medallion, powder blue panels filled with a tiny cross-and-diamond tile lattice, cornflower blue panels with a scrolling ivory arabesque, teal panels with a palmette and ivory scroll, gray panels with 3 blue tulips, and narrow ivory panels with a single burgundy boteh. Over the whole grid a second layer is drawn: 2 great burgundy vines rise from the bottom corners, cross the panels without regard to the grid, sprout serrated saz leaves and small blossoms, and meet at the top, so the field reads as a garden seen through a trellis. A navy inner guard with an ivory arabesque frames the field, followed by the main border on a sand ground: an alternating row of large lobed cartouches, ivory ones holding a palmette bouquet with a pair of blue and brown birds, sand ones holding a rosette and blossom spray, separated by a tight brown and ivory lattice, and at the top center a peach cartouche carries the weaver's signature. A second navy arabesque guard and a plain sand selvage close the design.
Colors of This Ivory and Navy Nain 4La Rug
Nain's palette is ivory, blue and camel, and this rug keeps to it while stretching it as far as it will go. The grid bands, the border ground and the selvage are a warm sand, and the majority of the panels are a soft ivory cream, so from across the room the rug reads as a light, pale piece with a dark frame. That frame is a midnight navy so deep it reads as black, used for the 2 guard borders, the medallion arabesques and every outline, and it is the navy that makes the small motifs legible at 900 knots. Inside the panels the blues run from a clear cornflower in the arabesque compartments through a powder blue in the tile lattices to a gray blue in the tulip panels, and a teal green appears in 4 panels and in the medallion star. Peach is used for the 3 medallion panels and the signature cartouche, a burgundy wine for the great vines, the boteh and the flower cores, a warm brown for stems and the border lattice, and a gray for leaves and the smaller blossoms. The silk in the pile sits in the ivory outlines and the pale flowers, which is why the panels flash in the rolled photographs while the navy stays matte. The back shows every color slightly lighter with no bleeding, and the knots are so fine they read as cloth.
Nain 4La and Why This Rug Cannot Be Replaced
Nain rugs are graded by La, the number of thread strands twisted into each warp: 9La is the commercial grade, 6La the fine grade that made the town famous, and 4La the rarest, woven only by a handful of master workshops and only in small formats, because a 4La warp is so thin that the knot count climbs past 800 and a rug this size takes more than a year. A 4La on a silk foundation is rarer again, since silk warps are thinner and stronger than cotton and let the weaver push past 900 knots per square inch, and a 4La in a garden panel design rather than the standard medallion is close to unique. Our guide to Nain 6La and Habibian rugs explains the grades, and the Persian Nain Rugs Guide covers the town. A signed, unused 4La of this kind does not come to market often, and when it does it is bought as a collector's piece rather than a floor covering. Among 5x7 Persian rugs it is a piece for a study, a bedroom or a wall, and it is the finest Nain we have handled.
