Museum · Cleveland, United States
Cleveland Museum of Art
A museum in Ohio with a dedicated department of Indian and Southeast Asian art and free general admission. It owns the Tuti-nama painted for Akbar around 1560.
See first
- The Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot), c. 1560
- The Indian and Southeast Asian galleries
- The Open Access collection online
Cleveland is not where most people expect to find the origins of Mughal painting.
The Tuti-nama, or Tales of a Parrot, is a Persian collection of fifty-two moralising stories told by a talking parrot, each meant to keep a woman from an affair. Its roots go back to an older Sanskrit collection, the Shukasaptati. The copy in Cleveland was painted for the emperor Akbar around 1560, and the museum treats it as a record of the origins of Mughal painting: this is the style before it settled. It has 341 folios. The museum acquired it in 1962.
Check whether leaves are on view before you travel. The museum’s Indian and Southeast Asian department, one of sixteen, has more besides.
Two practical things help. General admission is free. And the museum’s Open Access programme puts images of works it considers in the public domain online for anyone to use, including many leaves of the Tuti-nama.
