Qom | 152 x 110 cm | Nr. Z-4624

Qom, terracotta with border, medallion and paradise garden pattern

Origin	Persia
Dimensions	152 cm x 110 cm (= 1.67 m²)
Construction	hand-knotted
Material	Pile: wool (hand-spun, natural dyes) Weft & Warp: cotton
knots per m²2	360.000
Pile height	8mm
Year of manufacture	1985
Colour	Terracotta, blue-grey
Edition	one-of-a-kind piece

Origin

Qom is a relatively young provenance for Persian rugs. The city of Qom (also Ghom, Gom, Ghoum, Goum) lies in central Iran, about 100 km south of the capital Tehran. As there was no old knotting tradition in Qom to build on, patterns were and still are adopted from other weaving regions. Over time, however, a style of its own has grown out of this. The silk rugs from Qom are today among the most famous and finest rugs in the world. The field of rugs from Qom often has a light ground decorated with finely drawn medallion patterns or all-over boteh or vase designs.

Pattern

This Qom is graced by a wonderful paradise garden motif. The paradise garden motif is typical of the Safavid era. Paradise garden rugs show a stylised, geometricised depiction of a traditional Persian garden with delicate plants and trees. The Greek word "paradeisos" goes back to the Middle Persian word "pardēs". Originally the term referred to the Persian royal gardens; only in the biblical context did it acquire the connotation of the garden of God. The fertile, artfully laid out royal gardens were home to a wide variety of exotic plants and animals. They were enclosed by a wall, a symbol of the separation between heaven and earth. Traditional Persian paradise gardens were rectangular, with a river or another body of water running from north to south and from east to west, forming a cross that divides the garden into four sections. In rugs depicting paradise gardens, too, the portrayal of water – so precious in arid regions – plays a prominent role.

The background of this Qom is terracotta. The border is worked in terracotta, light red and blue-grey.

Condition

You are not the first to take a liking to this Qom. It had owners before you who valued it and used it. The fringes are knotted but already heavily worn, so they could be re-knotted to make them last longer. Prolonged exposure to sunlight has shifted the colours a little. It was hand-knotted around 1985. We have cleaned it thoroughly and restored it with care. It is therefore – despite its age – in very good condition.

Material

The technique used to prepare the materials for the pile of this Qom is more than 200 years old. The wool was dyed with natural dyes and spun by hand. Dyeing with natural or plant-based dyes is more complicated, more expensive and more time-consuming than dyeing with chemical colours. For a luminous red, for example, you need roughly one kilo of ground madder root as dyestuff per kilo of wool. For a strong yellow that is not too pale, you even need two kilograms of weld dye per kilo of wool. Spinning the wool is just as time-consuming and labour-intensive. On top of that, fewer and fewer people still master the craft of spinning wool by hand.

But the effort is worth it: because it is dyed with natural colours, the high-quality wool keeps its natural lanolin content. Wool dyed with natural colours and spun by hand creates fascinating, shifting patterns. The charm of hand-spun wool, with its slight irregularities and natural shades, comes into its own as a contrast in modern interiors, but equally in rooms furnished in a more traditional or country-house style. The weft and warp threads of this Qom are made of cotton. This versatile material is tear-resistant and elastic, which makes it particularly well suited to a hard-wearing foundation weave.