A Prince Visiting a Holy Man in a Rocky Landscape (recto) (c. 1590): Art, History and Details

A Prince Visiting a Holy Man in a Rocky Landscape (recto) (c. 1590) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A recurring theme in the art of India is the relationship between rulers and the religious practitioners who were believed to control supernatural forces that would aid in the success of rule and war. A prince has come to the abode of a Sufi mystic dervish, who sits with two acolytes in front of a rocky cave that may be his dwelling. The dervish appears to be blessing the prince and the weapons carried by his retinue to help assure success in an upcoming battle. In the foreground, a princely figure leading a horse meets surreptitiously with an eccentric figure holding a squat vessel, possibly filled with a narcotic substance such as bhang, used by many groups of mystics to aid in reaching trance states.

Object facts

• Title: A Prince Visiting a Holy Man in a Rocky Landscape (recto)
• Date: c. 1590
• Culture: India, Mughal, 16th century
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 34 x 20.7 cm (13 3/8 x 8 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.302.a

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

• Sotheby's London. Fine Oriental Miniatures and Manuscripts. 20 June 1983.
• Heeramaneck, Alice N. Masterpieces of Indian Painting: From the Former Collections of Nasli M. Heeramaneck. [Place of publication not identified]: A.N. Heeramaneck, 1984.
• 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.