Gold Oval Qum

100% silk pile, hand-knotted in Qum, with silk fringe at both ends and a small signature cartouche at one end. Silk is strong in tension but delicate in every other respect — it abrades, it marks with water, and it loses lustre permanently if treated like wool.

The gold field is open and lightly drawn, so marks show readily at the centre of the rug. Gold and yellow silk are also among the dyes most sensitive to light — keep it well away from a sunny window. The burgundy and navy frame is far more forgiving. At 98×150cm the rug can be used on a floor, but one people cross in socks rather than shoes.

This design sets a circle inside an oval, and the space between the two shapes is where it gets its calm. Look at the gold ground between the round burgundy medallion and the scaled rim of the field: at the sides it is a narrow band, but at the top and bottom it opens out into wide pools of gold. The weaver used that extra room on the long axis for the two navy cross-shaped finials, the only strong accents on the field, and left the side bands to fine flowering stems. Because a circle does not change shape as it meets the longer oval, the eye reads the medallion as fixed and the field as stretched around it, which makes a small rug feel longer and more open than its size. The same scalloped outline appears on both edges — around the medallion and around the oval — so the two shapes are clearly related, one nested in the other, rather than two unrelated forms placed on the same ground.