Qom | 168 x 115 cm | Nr. Z-4617

Qom, light red with border and paradise garden pattern

Origin	Persia
Dimensions	168 cm x 115 cm (= 1.93 m²)
Construction	hand-knotted
Material	Pile: wool (hand-spun, natural dyes) Weft & Warp: cotton
knots per m²2	360.000
Pile height	7mm
Year of manufacture	1980
Colour	Light red, dark blue
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

The paradise garden design is a stylised depiction of a traditional Persian garden. The Greek word "paradeisos" goes back to the Middle Persian word "pardēs". Originally the word referred to the Persian royal gardens, and only in the biblical context did it take on 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 are enclosed by a wall, symbolic of the separation between heaven and earth. Paradise gardens are places of veneration and symbols of status. Traditional Persian gardens were rectangular, with a river or body of water running from north to south and from east to west, forming a cross that divides the garden into four sections. Roofed pavilions or structures and raised walkways for viewing the garden from above were just as common as fountains and waterfalls symbolising eternal life. In rugs with a paradise garden motif – like this one – the depiction of water, so precious in arid regions, plays a prominent role.

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

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.