The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Tuti the parrot begins to tell Khujasta a story about the importance of keeping secrets. The green and gold tiled floor, mauve background, and arabesque, yellow band are vestiges of an earlier paining tradition.

Object facts

• Title: The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot)
• 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: 10.4 x 10 cm (4 1/8 x 3 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.138.a

A detail from the museum

Khujasta’s attendant whisks flies away with a strip of cloth.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• Nakhshabī, Z̤iyāʼ al-Dīn, and Muhammed Ahmed Simsar. Tales of a Parrot = The Cleveland Museum of Art's Ṭūṭīnāma. Cleveland: The Museum, 1978.
• 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.