The prince meets a carefree dancing dervish whose good fortune he purchases for his ring, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighteenth Night (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The prince meets a carefree dancing dervish whose good fortune he purchases for his ring, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighteenth Night (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

The prince, in the orange tunic, had been exiled by his older brother who inherited the throne, so he decided to travel the country. In a wilderness he met a dancing dervish to whom wild animals seemed mystically drawn; the deer are unconcerned about the tiger nearby. Dervishes are Sufi holy men whose dances bring them closer to god, but in this ironic story, the dervish dances for joy, because he just perceived an omen that he was about to become rich. The prince handed him his signet ring in exchange for the dervish’s good fortune.

Object facts

• Title: The prince meets a carefree dancing dervish whose good fortune he purchases for his ring, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Eighteenth Night
• 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: 6.9 x 10.5 cm (2 11/16 x 4 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.131.b

A detail from the museum

The animals in the wilderness include a tiger, two does, and a blackbuck.

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.