9' x 9'6" Persian Nain Square Rug | Dome Medallion in Rust, Blue & Ivory | Wool & Silk, Approx. 500 KPSI

At 9' x 9'6" this is a genuinely square piece, and the weaver used that format the way an architect would: the entire surface is one picture rather than a repeating field. The drawing is the Gonbadi, or dome, composition, the inside of a domed ceiling seen from directly underneath, with a sapphire starburst at the apex and ring after ring of panels widening out toward a circular frame that the four corners then square off. The pile is wool with silk used on the outlines and small details, which is why the whole dome appears to shift and catch light as you walk around it. Among Persian Nain rugs this level of drawing is workshop grade, and true square Persian rugs in this quality are far scarcer than rectangles. The rug is new, never used, and ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

Count outward from the center and the discipline of the cartoon becomes obvious. A small sapphire rosette sits at the core, wrapped in an ivory halo of thin blue arabesque and split leaf vine that fans into 16 radiating points. From there the field breaks into concentric rings of lanceolate panels, each one outlined in ivory and filled with its own 4 petal rosette, tendrils and tiny stars, growing larger as they travel toward the circular border so the eye reads the curve of a dome rather than a flat plane. The 4 corners carry burgundy spandrels with green vase forms, palmettes and blossoming stems, and the main border runs an ivory ground of blue floral vine punctuated by burgundy cartouches, held between navy and camel guard stripes. The back photograph shows the payoff: the knot is small enough for the outlines to stay crisp at a quarter of an inch, which is what keeps the panel grid from blurring as it curves.

Rust, Emerald and Sapphire Across the Field

The ground is a warm rust, closer to terracotta and copper than to brick red, and it reads slightly lighter where the silk outlines catch light and deeper in the low pile of the open areas. Set against it, the panels are a cool emerald to pine green, each interior worked in ivory, straw and small hits of dark blue. The center is the coldest point of the rug: sapphire and navy blue laid over an ivory halo, with burgundy, camel and pale blue florals inside the medallion itself. Burgundy returns in the 4 corner spandrels and again as small cartouches in the border, so the warm red tone circles the rug and ties the corners back to the field. Ivory does the structural work throughout, outlining every panel and carrying the main border, which keeps a saturated palette of rust, green and blue from going heavy. In a room with warm wood or stone, the rust ground reads as the dominant color; under cooler daylight the blues and greens come forward.

Nain Weaving and Quality

Nain sits on the western edge of the central Persian desert, a few hours from Isfahan, and its looms only turned to rugs in the 20th century after the town's fine wool cloth trade slowed. That textile background shows in the product: very fine spun wool, a tight cotton foundation, silk reserved for outlining rather than splashed across the field, and a palette built on ivory and blue that Nain made its own. A square like this one is harder to weave than it looks, because any drift in the knot count across the width would push the dome out of round and the error would be visible from the doorway; here the rings close cleanly and the 4 corners match. At approximately 500 knots per square inch the weave is well above village work and firmly in workshop territory, dense enough to hold detail at the scale of a single rosette while keeping the low, even pile that lets the silk read. The back tag confirms the origin, the rug number PIX-21944 and the 274 x 294 cm measurement.