Mahliqa, Daughter of the Emperor of China, Pointing at the Bird-Man Khwaja Mubarak: A Leaf from a Poetical Romance Relating to Shah Alam I (recto) (c. 1710): Art, History and Details

Mahliqa, Daughter of the Emperor of China, Pointing at the Bird-Man Khwaja Mubarak: A Leaf from a Poetical Romance Relating to Shah Alam I (recto) (c. 1710) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

A Persian inscription identifies the bird-man in the tree by name, but the text in which he appears remains unidentified. Also unknown is the Chinese princess Mahliqa (“she who has a face like the moon”), named in a Persian inscription written in front of her face. The artist depicts her in the dress of a Mughal court lady, except for the addition of an unusual headdress, and her handmaidens all look Indian. They gesture to the bird-man from the opposite side of a formal garden canal with fountains. A fortified city lies in the distance behind the walled garden, while creatures peer up at the fabulous composite figure from the water below.

Object facts

• Title: Mahliqa, Daughter of the Emperor of China, Pointing at the Bird-Man Khwaja Mubarak: A Leaf from a Poetical Romance Relating to Shah Alam I (recto)
• Date: c. 1710
• Culture: Mughal India
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 42.2 x 28.5 cm (16 5/8 x 11 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.336.a

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.