The parrot addresses Khujasta at the beginning of the thirty-first night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The parrot addresses Khujasta at the beginning of the thirty-first 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:

On the thirty-first of fifty-two nights, Tuti the talking parrot begins to tell Khujasta a moralizing story about a blue jackal who, through trickery, briefly became the emir of wild beasts. The original underdrawing in black and red is visible beneath the flaked paint on Khujasta’s face and upper body.

Object facts

• Title: The parrot addresses Khujasta at the beginning of the thirty-first 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: 6.2 x 10.2 cm (2 7/16 x 4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.203.b

A detail from the museum

The painting depicting the blue jackal is in the Edwin Binney 3rd Collection of the San Diego Museum of Art (1990.273).

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.