Landscape with a lotus pool, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighth Night (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

Landscape with a lotus pool, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighth Night (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A serene, blue lotus pool is surrounded by plants and wildlife. Bright yellow squirrels climb up the thin trunks of date palms, while birds perch in the treetops. Fish swim in the stylized “basket-weave” water. This is one of only two non-narrative landscape scenes in this volume of the Tuti-nama.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with a lotus pool, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighth Night
• Date: c. 1560
• Culture: Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Painting only: 4 x 10.4 cm (1 9/16 x 4 1/8 in.); Overall: 20 x 13.8 cm (7 7/8 x 5 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.57.b

A detail from the museum

The lotus pool has a long tradition in pre-Mughal painting.

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.

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.