The lover’s son makes an elephant of the pastry dough carried by the unfaithful wife and puts it in her basket, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighth Night (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The lover’s son makes an elephant of the pastry dough carried by the unfaithful wife and puts it in her basket, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): 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:

On her way to bring a meal to her husband, a woman encountered a man who offered her money for sex. They embrace and go off to a sheltered place, leaving his son with the food basket. Bored with waiting for them, he fashions a pastry from the woman’s basket into the shape of an elephant.

Object facts

• Title: The lover’s son makes an elephant of the pastry dough carried by the unfaithful wife and puts it in her basket, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): 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: Painting only: 8.9 x 9.9 cm (3 1/2 x 3 7/8 in.); Overall: 20 x 14.4 cm (7 7/8 x 5 11/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.62.a

A detail from the museum

The mango tree at the right is native to India.

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.
• Seyller, John. “Overpainting in the Cleveland T̤ūtīnāma.” Artibus Asiae 52, no. 3/4 (1992): 283-318.

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.