Persian Couplets (recto); Sleeping Youth (verso) (late 1500s–early 1600s): Art, History and Details

Persian Couplets (recto); Sleeping Youth (verso) (late 1500s–early 1600s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Riza-yi Abbasi (Iranian).

The work and its context

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

Under Shah Abbas, the tradition in which painting was employed to illustrate a literary work was all but abandoned. In its place came a new concern with single-page illustrations, such as this one, which have no specific content or meaning. They often illustrate albums of collections of verses about love and beauty, in which these themes often appear to serve as allegories of things divine.

Object facts

• Title: Persian Couplets (recto); Sleeping Youth (verso)
• Date: late 1500s–early 1600s
• Creator attribution: Riza-yi Abbasi (Iranian)
• Culture: Iran, Isfahan, Safavid period (1501-1722)
• Type: Manuscript
• Technique: ink, gold, and opaque watercolor on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 21 x 12.4 cm (8 1/4 x 4 7/8 in.); Overall: 31.6 x 20.4 cm (12 7/16 x 8 1/16 in.); Text area: 21 x 12.4 cm (8 1/4 x 4 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Islamic Art
• Department: Islamic Art
• Accession number: 1944.494

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Islamic Art: Selected Examples from the Loan Exhibition of Islamic Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art. [Cleveland]: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1944.
• The Arts of Persia and Mohammedan India: Ninth to the Nineteenth Century. Pasadena, CA: Pasadena Art Institute, 1949.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.

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.