Grotesque Dancers Performing (c. 1600): Art, History and Details

Grotesque Dancers Performing (c. 1600) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

This scene from an unidentified manuscript depicts entertainers at the Mughal court. The dancers appear to be from the fringes of society, and they may be intended to depict tribal people or semihuman nature spirits. One is dark skinned with small elephant ears and red-rimmed eyes, wearing a white tiger-skin pelt. The female dancer wears a collar of leaves; the male figure on the right has horns, wears bells, and carries an animal-headed club that appears to be made of bone. An exuberant orchestra provides musical and vocal accompaniment below. While not an imperial production, this painting may reference the Mughal emperor Akbar’s practice of welcoming a wide range of people from all regions and traditions to his court, since he was interested in understanding their customs.

Object facts

• Title: Grotesque Dancers Performing
• Date: c. 1600
• Culture: Mughal India
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 16 x 9 cm (6 5/16 x 3 9/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1971.88

A detail from the museum

Akbar applied an aromatic paste under his arms, which stained his garment.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Leach, Linda York. Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.
• Masselos, Jim, Jackie Menzies, Pratapaditya Pal, and Reis Wenger Flora. Dancing to the Flute: Music and Dance in Indian Art. Sydney, Australia: Art Gallery of New South Wales, 1997.
• McGill, Forrest. Beyond Bollywood: 2000 Years of Dance in the Arts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Himalayan Region. San Francisco, CA: Asian Art Museum, 2022.

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.