The bag of gold which he received for the slave girl being stolen in a mosque, the young man of Baghdad tears his cloths and is about to fling himself into the Tigris, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Par

The bag of gold which he received for the slave girl being stolen in a mosque, the young man of Baghdad tears his cloths and is about to fling himself into the Tigris, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-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:

In the foreground, the distraught young man stands at the edge of the rushing river. Desperate for money, he has sold his lover, a slave girl, but finds himself destitute again. A group of onlookers watch the distressed man from the courtyard in front of the mosque. They will jump into the water to save him before he can drown.

Object facts

• Title: The bag of gold which he received for the slave girl being stolen in a mosque, the young man of Baghdad tears his cloths and is about to fling himself into the Tigris, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-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: Overall: 20.3 x 14 cm (8 x 5 1/2 in.); Painting only: 11.7 x 10.1 cm (4 5/8 x 4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.306.a

A detail from the museum

Gigantic fish and a crocodile lurk in the swirling waters of the Tigris.

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.