Princess and attendant in trompe l’oeil window (c. 1765): Art, History and Details

Princess and attendant in trompe l’oeil window (c. 1765) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Aqil Khan (Indian, active mid-1700s).

The work and its context

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

A golden window shade has been rolled up to reveal a princess seated on a terrace. The carpet draped over the sill echoes that of the balcony rail where royals would show themselves to the public. Rather than taking the view of an outsider, the viewer looks from inside the palace out to the women and the wooded landscape beyond. During the mid-1600s, the Mughal court introduced a preference for the patterns on carpets and textiles: flowering plants on a plain ground. This influential fashion derived from their appreciation of European botanical studies that merchants and diplomats brought to India.

Object facts

• Title: Princess and attendant in trompe l’oeil window
• Date: c. 1765
• Creator attribution: Aqil Khan (Indian, active mid-1700s)
• Culture: Mughal India, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 12.5 x 7.8 cm (4 15/16 x 3 1/16 in.); Overall: 44 x 31.6 cm (17 5/16 x 12 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1955.297

A detail from the museum

Unlike in portraits of the emperor, women sit on the outside of the royal window.

Collection credit

Gift of George P. Bickford

Further reading listed by the museum

• Ward, William E. "Two Rajput Paintings and a Rajput Textile." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 43, no. 4 (1956): 62–65.
• Lee, Sherman. "The Decorative and the Super-Real: Two Rajasthani Miniatures." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 44, no. 8 (October 1957): 180-183.
• Leach, Linda York. Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.

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.