Qom | 197 x 133 cm | Nr. Z-4631

Qom, light red with border and panel pattern

Origin	Persia
Dimensions	197 cm x 133 cm (= 2.62 m²)
Construction	hand-knotted
Material	Pile: wool (hand-spun, natural dyes) Weft & Warp: cotton
knots per m²2	360.000
Pile height	6mm
Year of manufacture	1980
Colour	Light red, turquoise
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 compartment pattern of this Qom recalls a lushly planted garden with geometrically laid-out beds, each framed on its own. This design is so characteristic that rugs with a compartment pattern are also known as garden rugs. The individual compartments of this Qom's pattern each show different motifs, yet follow a strictly symmetrical, rectangular arrangement.

There is a reason for this: large parts of Persia and many other regions of the Middle and Near East are desert- or steppe-like arid areas, where so-called irrigation horticulture is widely practised. Water is channelled to the beds through small irrigation canals. The panel pattern renders this irrigation system in heavily simplified form. Because of the dryness in these regions, blooming and verdant gardens are also something quite special. The panel pattern therefore probably goes back to the wish to bring a little garden – and with it a small paradise – into the home. In the Koran the term garden, as the earthly counterpart to paradise – a word of Old Persian origin, incidentally – appears very frequently.

The overall impression is dominated by light red and turquoise. The border is worked in light red, dark blue and beige.

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.