A woman asks her lover to leave her house, brandishing his sword and feigning rage in order to deceive her husband who has just arrived, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighth Night (c. 1560): A

A woman asks her lover to leave her house, brandishing his sword and feigning rage in order to deceive her husband who has just arrived, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighth Night (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Gujarati (Indian, active 1550s-1590s).

The work and its context

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

A shrewd woman is carrying on an affair with a painter. When her husband suddenly returns home, she quickly concocts a plan to prevent them both from being caught. Hidden beneath the table is the painter’s young apprentice who, unbeknownst to the painter, was also seduced by the woman.

Object facts

• Title: A woman asks her lover to leave her house, brandishing his sword and feigning rage in order to deceive her husband who has just arrived, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighth Night
• Date: c. 1560
• Creator attribution: Gujarati (Indian, active 1550s-1590s)
• Culture: Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 20 x 14.3 cm (7 7/8 x 5 5/8 in.); Painting only: 16.7 x 10 cm (6 9/16 x 3 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.58.a

A detail from the museum

Gujarati is not a proper name but designates that the painter is from Gujarat.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• Chandra, Pramod, and Daniel J. Ehnbom. The Cleveland Tuti-Nama Manuscript and the Origins of Mughal Painting. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1976.
• Chandra, Pramod, and Daniel J. Ehnbom. The Cleveland Tuti-Nama Manuscript and the Origins of Mughal Painting. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1976.
• Chandra, Pramod, and Daniel J. Ehnbom. The Cleveland Tuti-Nama Manuscript and the Origins of Mughal Painting. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1976.

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.