Ivory Arabesque Qum

100% silk pile, hand-knotted in Qum, with silk fringe at both ends and a signature cartouche in the inner guard 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.

At 100×160cm this rug is large enough to use on a floor, but it should be a floor people cross in socks rather than shoes. The ivory field is the palest silk on the rug and takes up most of it, so it will show a spill or a water ring before anything else. The cartouche sits close to the fringe at one end, where wear on a floor rug concentrates.

Look at this rug twice: once standing at one end, and once kneeling beside it. From standing height it is a medallion rug — a radiating star at the centre, pendants reaching up and down, the corners set apart as spandrels. Kneel down and all of that disappears into a single all-over floral, the same small palmettes and blossoms running uninterrupted from the medallion to the border. Both readings are correct, because the workshop never gave the medallion or the corners a ground of their own. The medallion exists only as a pale green outline laid over the field, and the spandrels only as a shift in the ground from ivory to a faint blue-green, with the floral carried straight across the change. Follow any stem from the centre towards a corner and you will find it does not stop at either boundary. It is a subtle way to build a medallion design, and a demanding one: with no solid shapes to hold the composition, it depends entirely on the drawing being even across the whole field.