A double-sided folio from the 'Chester Beatty Tutinama': The slaying of a dragon, India, Mughal, circa 1580-85

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April 26, 01:36 PM GMT

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40,000 - 60,000 GBP

Lot Details

Description

gouache heightened with gold on paper, inscribed in nasta'liq in black ink on recto and verso with verses from the Tutinama of Ziya' al-Din Nakhshabi

painting recto: 15.5 by 11.9cm.

painting verso: 16.2 by 13cm.

leaf: 23.9 by 16cm.

Sotheby's, 13 April 1976, lot 12.
Ex-collection Khosrovani, Geneva.

Goswamy and Fischer, Wonders of a golden age - Painting at the
Court of the great Mughals, Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 1987, no.74.

The Tutinama or Tales of the Parrot is a collection of moralising fables compiled by Ziya' al-Din Nakhshabi in Persia in the fourteenth century. The emperor Akbar commissioned two manuscripts of the Tutinama. This folio is from the second, more refined version of this now dispersed manuscript, the majority of whose leaves are in the collection of the Chester Beatty Library. An earlier version in a simpler style (circa 1560-65) known as the 'Cleveland Tutinama' with most of its folios being in the Cleveland Museum of Art, is one of the most important transitional examples of early Akbari Mughal painting.

This folio comes from towards the end of the manuscript and illustrates the episode when a young man who is destined to become a king, falls in love with the daughter of a king from a foreign land and slays a dragon to enable him to take the princess's hand in marriage.