Cleveland Museum of Art
The Raja’s daughter, born with three breasts, accompanies her blind husband and his hunchback guide on a journey, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-second Night
- Date
- c. 1560
- Medium
- gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
- Culture
- Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
- Department
- Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Institution
- Cleveland Museum of Art
- Object ID
- 137720
From the Cleveland Museum of Art record
The blind man clutches tightly to the hunchback’s staff with one hand and his wife’s arm with the other. At the front of the group, the hunchback points ahead to their ultimate destination—a city far from where the raja’s daughter was born. This image represents a story within the story that is being told by a parrot to the merchant’s son ‘Ubaid in order to cure his infatuation with his wife. The woman was forced to leave home after soothsayers predicted that she would someday harm her father.
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Provenance & credit
As published by the source institution. Coverage varies — not every institution's open-data feed includes ownership history.
- Credit line
- Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry
- Provenance
- ?–1959: Estate of Breckinridge Long [1881–1958], Bowie, MD | 1959–1962?: (Harry Burke Antiques, Philadelphia, PA) | 1959?–1962: (Bernard Brown Agency, Milwaukee, WI, sold to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Purchased with funds from Mrs. A. Dean [Helen Wade Greene] Perry) | 1962–: The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
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