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Green Parrot
c. 1820
- Medium
- Gum tempera on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Overall: 38.5 x 28.6 cm (15 3/16 x 11 1/4 in.)
- Culture
- India, East India Company School
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Bequest of Edgar A. Hahn
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Cleveland Museum of Art
About this work
Made by an Indian artist for a British civil servant working in Calcutta (now Kolkata), this bird is portrayed with precision and brilliant color. It appears to be of the same type as Tuti, the protagonist of the early Mughal Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) manuscript. This example, however, has a black beak, indicating she is female, while the male Tuti has a red beak. Though loosely translated as “parrot,” Tuti is technically a Lord Derby’s parakeet. Because of its ability to talk, the parrot often appears in Indo-Iranian tales as a messenger of moral wisdom.
