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

When the sun, like a saffron-hued frog, plunged into the pond in the west and the moon, like a fish, came out of its snare in the east, Khujasta adorned with many kinds of jewels and bedecked with a variety of gold and silver ornaments went to Tuti to ask permission to leave. The parrot’s cage seems to hover in midair in the porch of a domed pavilion. The flowering treeentwining the cypress alludes to Khujasta’s desire to embrace her lover. As waterfowl course through the air, the parrot begins his story about the frog king Shapur.

Object facts

• Title: The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Twenty-sixth 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: 11.4 x 10.3 cm (4 1/2 x 4 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.179.b

A detail from the museum

The flowering tree entwining the cypress alludes to Khujasta’s desire to embrace her lover.

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.

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.