Page from the "Chester Beatty" Tuti-nama: Episodes from the Story of the Lynx and the Lion (Primary Title)
Page from the "Chester Beatty" Tuti-name: Animals Sporting in a Forest (Former Title)
Unknown (Artist)
The Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot), composed in Persian around 1330 in North India, consists of fifty-two stories told, one per night, by a clever parrot to prevent his owner’s wife from visiting a young lover while her husband is away. The Mughal emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) must have enjoyed these charming stories, for two extensively illustrated imperial copies of the Tuti-nama survive from the early years of his reign. This page is from one of these, named after the library in Dublin where most of its illustrated leaves are preserved. Its paintings, like this one depicting scenes from the twenty-eighth night’s tale, are rapidly executed in a simple but expressive style. The parrot tells of a lion who left his servant, a monkey, in charge of his den. A lynx claims the absentee’s home and eventually tricks the lion into turning on the monkey and abandoning his den to the smaller cat and his family. Set in a landscape of flowering plants, feathery trees, magenta rocks, and a gurgling stream, we see two episodes from the story: conversations between the lynx and his wife and between the monkey and the lion.
Akbar period
Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Gift of Paul Mellon
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