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

The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Seventh 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:

Every night for 52 nights the sly domesticated parrot encourages his master’s wife Khujasta to meet her lover under cover of darkness. Just before she leaves, the parrot mentions a topic from a tantalizing tale; she becomes so curious that she cannot go out before hearing the whole story. By the time the story ends, dawn breaks, and it is too late for her to go out unnoticed. The artist who painted this page was still firmly entrenched in the idioms of pre-Mughal painting.

Object facts

• Title: The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Seventh 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: 9 x 10 cm (3 9/16 x 3 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.43.a

A detail from the museum

This miniature displays an intermingling of various pre-Akbar idioms in the Mughal atelier.

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, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1976.
• 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.