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 museum's creator attribution is Gujarati (Indian, active 1550s-1590s).

The work and its context

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

Two white birds wade at the edges of a dark colored lotus pool surrounded by lush green trees. Though the artist is from the western Indian state of Gujarat, many elements reveal a familiarity with Persian painting conventions, such as the arid pink ground with tufts of grass, the overlapping leaves of the trees, and the grassy sward. The water was once silver, which has now tarnished black, and white lines render swirling eddies.

Object facts

• Title: Landscape with a lotus pool, 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 13.6 cm (7 7/8 x 5 3/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.59.a

A detail from the museum

The inscription on this page attributes it to the same artist as the previous painting (1962.279.58.a).

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.

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.