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

The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Tenth Night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Iqbal (Indian, active 1550s-1590s).

The work and its context

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

Tuti the wise parrot begins to tell Khujasta a moralizing tale of a merchant, the son of a vizier, and a magical, wooden parrot. An inscription in the margin of this page attributes it to the painter Iqbal.

Object facts

• Title: The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Tenth Night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot)
• Date: c. 1560
• Creator attribution: Iqbal (Indian, active 1550s-1590s)
• 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: 9.9 x 10.1 cm (3 7/8 x 4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.80.b

A detail from the museum

Khujasta’s large face and the rendering of her scarf are vestiges of an earlier style.

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.
• Chandra, Pramod, and Daniel J. Ehnbom. The Cleveland Tuti-Nama Manuscript and the Origins of Mughal Painting. [Cleveland]: 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.

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.