Black and Cream Kashan Floral Medallion, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, with a natural fringe at both ends. At this size the rug is light enough to lift and shake out, which is the easiest way to keep it clean.

A black ground is the most forgiving colour a rug can have for marks and everyday soiling, with one exception: it shows lint, pet hair and pale fibres more clearly than any other colour. The cream border is the part that will grey, and on a mat this size it takes traffic on all four sides.

The framework of this rug is entirely classical: a lobed medallion on the centre line, a pendant reaching from each end of it, spandrels closing the four corners of the field, and a border of linked rosettes. That scheme is the Kashan layout, and it has been drawn in Persia for centuries. What fills the field between those elements is not classical at all.

Look at the flowers scattered across the black ground and you will find roses — not stylised palmettes or rosettes reduced to geometry, but recognisable garden roses with layered, overlapping petals, drawn much as they would be in a European flower painting. They arrived in Persian weaving in the nineteenth century, when printed European textiles reached the workshops, and the design vocabulary absorbed them under the name gol-e-farangi, the foreign flower. This rug shows the two side by side: an ancient framework filled with an imported bloom, and neither looks out of place against the other. Compare a rose in the field with a rosette in the border and the difference is immediate — one is observed from life, the other constructed from rules.