The court of the Raja of Ujjain, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-sixth Night (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The court of the Raja of Ujjain, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-sixth 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:

When out hunting, the formidable raja of Ujjain captured a fantastic animal and brought it back to his court. It is described as being so soft that the fur of his body “made the back of the sable seem as hard as stone and the smoothness of whose coat made the fur of the ermine feel like the anvil of a blacksmith.” In devising this wondrous creature’s appearance, the artist gave him cloven hoofs, a beak, and horns, as though inspired by European images of griffins, but with soft-looking fur.

Object facts

• Title: The court of the Raja of Ujjain, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-sixth 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: 15.9 x 10.1 cm (6 1/4 x 4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.291.b

A detail from the museum

The artist of this folio attempted to make the windows on the back wall appear three dimensional.

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.