The third suitor strikes the devotee’s daughter and thus restores her to life, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Twentieth Night (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The third suitor strikes the devotee’s daughter and thus restores her to life, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Twentieth 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:

After the sudden, apparent death of the pious man’s daughter, her three suitors take her body from its grave. One of the suitors, a doctor, realizes that the woman is not dead and proposes flailing her to restore her consciousness. After she is successfully revived, the men resume their rivalry.

Object facts

• Title: The third suitor strikes the devotee’s daughter and thus restores her to life, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Twentieth 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: 7.8 x 10.1 cm (3 1/16 x 4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.146.b

A detail from the museum

The stain above the painting is from the acidic green pigment used to paint a tree on the reverse.

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.