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A prince riding a composite elephant
c. 1590
- Medium
- Gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
- Classification
- Painting
- Dimensions
- Page: 28.8 x 18.6 cm (11 5/16 x 7 5/16 in.); Painting: 14.5 x 11 cm (5 11/16 x 4 5/16 in.)
- Culture
- India, Golconda, Deccan, 16th century
- Museum
- Cleveland Museum of Art, Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Credit line
- Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection
- 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
A prince sits cross-legged in a covered howdah seat secured to the back of a royal elephant with golden rings on its tusks. The elephant is being driven by attendants, one of whom holds a goad. Artists in the southern Indian region known as the Deccan expanded upon Persian practices of embedding creatures in landscape scenes—like a visual double-entendre—and created inventive images of composite creatures made up of figures that invite extended close looking. This painting would have been mounted in an album that was brought out for entertainment in elite intimate gatherings.
