A female figure standing in a landscape holding a four-stringed “khuuchir” and a lotus (c. 1590): Art, History and Details

A female figure standing in a landscape holding a four-stringed “khuuchir” and a lotus (c. 1590) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Standing over flowering sprigs, holding a lotus like a scepter, the figure seems to magically impart fertility to a desert. In pan-Indian religious iconography (system of visual symbols that identify a figure), the lotus is held by the goddess of good fortune, prosperity, and abundance, who is frequently associated with ideal kingship. The stringed instrument recalls the Indian goddess of learning and music, but here it is of a Mongolian type, as is the feather in her crown. Her garments are reminiscent of those worn by biblical and classical figures in European engravings. This painting combines Indian, European, and Mongolian references.

Object facts

• Title: A female figure standing in a landscape holding a four-stringed “khuuchir” and a lotus
• Date: c. 1590
• Culture: Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 31.6 x 20.7 cm (12 7/16 x 8 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.311

A detail from the museum

The four strings of the woman’s khuuchir would have been made from silk.

Collection credit

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Mace, Sonya Rhie, Mohsen Ashtiany, Catherine Glynn, Pedro Moura Carvalho, Marcus Fraser, and Ruby Lal. Mughal Paintings: Art and Stories: the Cleveland Museum of Art. London: D Giles Limited, 2016.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.