The street cleaner, on his way to meet King Bhojaraja, sleeps under a tree where four thieves disguised as fellow travelers deprive him of a priceless pearl, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Twel

The street cleaner, on his way to meet King Bhojaraja, sleeps under a tree where four thieves disguised as fellow travelers deprive him of a priceless pearl, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Twelfth 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:

Many scholars consider the diminutive Tuti-nama to have been one of the first illustrated manuscripts made for Akbar, on which Indian artists worked with Persian masters to formulate a new style that their exacting emperor appreciated. The new Mughal style would be used to create the monumental Hamza-nama and hundreds of other Mughal manuscripts. There are many continuities between the Tuti-nama and the Hamza-nama, such as the image of a recumbent figure under a magnificent tree.

Object facts

• Title: The street cleaner, on his way to meet King Bhojaraja, sleeps under a tree where four thieves disguised as fellow travelers deprive him of a priceless pearl, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Twelfth 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: 10.5 x 10.4 cm (4 1/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.97.a

A detail from the museum

The body of the thief has been overpainted and repositioned.

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.