A Princess and Demons before a Nobleman: A Leaf from a Poetical Romance Relating to Shah Alam I (recto); Stenciled Scenes of Lion and Gazelle (verso) (c. 1710): Art, History and Details

A Princess and Demons before a Nobleman: A Leaf from a Poetical Romance Relating to Shah Alam I (recto); Stenciled Scenes of Lion and Gazelle (verso) (c. 1710) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The source story of this painting remains enigmatic to scholars, but it includes a range of depictions of the “other”––from the foreign to the demonic. A prince kneeling in front of his horse addresses a lady; the moon in front of her face may identify her as Mahliqa (“moonlike” in Arabic), the Chinese princess identified by inscription on the adjacent page. A group of men whose eyes hang vertically stand behind her. Horned figures with grass skirts lie slain behind them, presumably killed by the kneeling prince conspicuously holding a bow. The city in the background, at the top of the painting, is populated solely by women, and its eight surrounding walls are interspersed with slain composite creatures wearing leaf skirts, which may identify them as bands of forest-dwellers, or tribal groups.

Object facts

• Title: A Princess and Demons before a Nobleman: A Leaf from a Poetical Romance Relating to Shah Alam I (recto); Stenciled Scenes of Lion and Gazelle (verso)
• Date: c. 1710
• Culture: Mughal India
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 43 x 28.9 cm (16 15/16 x 11 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.337

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.
• Gruber, Christiane J., ed. The Moon: A Voyage Through Time. Toronto, Ontario: Aga Khan Museum, 2019.

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.