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

The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Twenty-Fourth 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:

Before Khujasta can sneak away to meet her secret lover, her husband’s talking parrot, Tuti, begins to tell her a tale about a man named Bahir and his lover Habbaza. Like all Tuti’s stories, this is accompanied by a moral message and intended to keep Khujasta from leaving for the night.

Object facts

• Title: The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Twenty-Fourth 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: 8.9 x 20 cm (3 1/2 x 7 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.165.b

A detail from the museum

The gold sky and blue hill are traits learned from Safavid Persian painting.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• 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.