Camel Oval Isfahan

Kork wool pile with silk, hand-knotted, with silk fringe at both ends. The rug is signed by Vahid Taghizadeh of Isfahan in a cartouche at one end.

Treat it as silk throughout, not as a wool rug with a little silk in it. The camel field is mid-toned and forgiving, but the ivory corners and border are not, and on this rug they are the outer third of the width. The signature sits in the cream band just above the fringe, where wear on a small rug concentrates. It is the part that cannot be replaced.

Lay a tape measure across this rug and the first thing it tells you is how much of it is border: of the 60cm width, about 21cm goes to the frame and only about 39cm to the field. That is not a design choice so much as a constraint. A workshop can shrink a medallion and an oval freely, but a border has to hold a minimum number of compartments before it stops reading as a border, and the guard stripes and navy lines cannot get narrower than a few rows of knots. So on a small Isfahan the frame takes a larger share than it would on a room-sized piece, and the field becomes something closer to a panel set inside a mount. Look at the corners outside the oval, too. At this scale they are too small for full spandrels, so they are filled with loose pale blue scrolls instead, which keeps them light and lets the camel oval hold the centre on its own.