The young man of Baghdad joins the Hashimi’s boat as a sailor to find his slave-girl on board, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-eighth Night (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The young man of Baghdad joins the Hashimi’s boat as a sailor to find his slave-girl on board, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-eighth 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 losing all his possessions, the destitute young man joins the crew of a merchant ship. Upon boarding, he quickly realizes that this ship belongs to the same merchant who purchased his lover, the slave girl. She stands in the center of the boat, her finger raised in a gesture of shock, gazing toward her long-lost love.

Object facts

• Title: The young man of Baghdad joins the Hashimi’s boat as a sailor to find his slave-girl on board, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-eighth 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: 11.4 x 10 cm (4 1/2 x 3 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.307.a

A detail from the museum

The title “Hashimi” designates the bearer as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad’s great-grandfather, Hashim.

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.
• Natif, Mika. Mughal Occidentalism: Artistic Encounters between Europe and Asia at the Courts of India, 1580-1630. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018.

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.