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An African Lyre Player (recto)

Unknown

1650

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Baroque Patna School of Painting Baroque Portrait Deccan

Dominant colour

An African Lyre Player (recto) is a 1650 unspecified by Unknown, a Baroque work, depicting Deccan, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Unknown
When & what style?: 1650 · Baroque
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

A man sits cross-legged, plucking a small wooden lyre with both hands. His dark skin and loose turban stand out against a plain background. This painting comes from the Deccan region of India in the 1600s, where African musicians often worked in royal courts. The lyre he plays is called a *nanga*—a type common in Nubia, not India. It’s unclear if he’s a real person or a general idea of a musician. To see more art from this time and place, look up india, deccan, 17th century.

The story of this work

Overview

The anonymity of the subject of this painting obscures whether this is a portrait of a historical person, or a generic depiction of a musician. The instrument in his hands is a bowl lyre, called a nanga, of the type from Nubia in northeastern Africa. Many Africans, mainly from Ethiopia, settled in the Deccan, on the western coast of southern India, where they found employment as soldiers, mercenaries, and administrators. While stereotypical associations of Africans with music and dance persist in this Deccani album page, the figure is well dressed and less caricatured than the painting from…

Read the full account in the museum source.