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Princess and attendant in trompe l’oeil window
Aqil Khan (Indian, active mid-1700s)
c. 1765
- Medium
- Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Image: 12.5 x 7.8 cm (4 15/16 x 3 1/16 in.); Overall: 44 x 31.6 cm (17 5/16 x 12 7/16 in.)
- Culture
- Mughal India, Uttar Pradesh, Lucknow
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Gift of George P. Bickford
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Teens profiles and older: its museum says too little about what it shows to place it for younger viewers. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
A golden window shade has been rolled up to reveal a princess seated on a terrace. The carpet draped over the sill echoes that of the balcony rail where royals would show themselves to the public. Rather than taking the view of an outsider, the viewer looks from inside the palace out to the women and the wooded landscape beyond.
During the mid-1600s, the Mughal court introduced a preference for the patterns on carpets and textiles: flowering plants on a plain ground. This influential fashion derived from their appreciation of European botanical studies that merchants and diplomats brought to India.
