Princess and attendant in trompe l’oeil window
1765
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
1765
unspecified
From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art
Princess and attendant in trompe l’oeil window is a 1765 unspecified by Aqil Khan, a Mughal Painting work, depicting Lucknow, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.
A princess sits on a terrace, her servant beside her, framed like a living portrait in an open window. The rolled-up golden shade looks so real you want to tug it down. This painting plays a trick—it lets you peek from inside the palace, not from the crowd below. The carpet spilling over the sill matches the one on the balcony, a quiet detail that ties the scene together. Mughal artists loved patterns like these, especially flowers on plain backgrounds. To see more of this style, look up mughal india, uttar pradesh, lucknow.
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…
Unlike in portraits of the emperor, women sit on the outside of the royal window.
Read the full account in the museum source.
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