A gilt-bronze figure of a bodhisattva, Tang dynasty

Sotheby's New York, 22nd September 2004, lot 7.

Reflection and Enlightenment: Chinese Buddhist Gilt Bronzes from the Jane and Leopold Swergold Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 2017-2018.

Leopold Swergold, Thoughts on Chinese Buddhist Gilt Bronzes, Aventura, 2014, cat. no. 20.

Stood nobly on a waisted lotus pedestal and stepped hexagonal base, this grand figure is wrapped in a long dhoti and fluttering scarves. With a kundika in the left hand, and a willow branch in the right, the figure is easily identified as the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, worshipped in China by the name of Guanyin. With the contours of their slender body well defined in a contrapposto silhouette and their clothes flowing gently with a ‘wet-drapery effect,’ this grand figure is characteristic of Buddhist sculpture at the very peak of production in the Tang dynasty. Bending at the knees, hips and neck in the regal tribhanga pose (literally the ‘posture of three’), the deity’s curving torso achieves an almost dancelike movement. This highly recognizable stylistic element of the swayed-hip posture became especially popular during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (712-756), when sculptures in general became more dynamic in their design.

Compare a similar bodhisattva image, with relatively large head and similar treatment of the robes, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, illustrated in Ulrich von Schroeder, Indo-Tibetan Bronzes, Hong Kong, 1981, p. 501, fig. 142F; a similar Avalokiteshvara with hexagonal, rather than square, base in the Harvard Art Museum's Buddhism and Early East Asian Buddhist Art exhibition (accession no. 1943.53.61); another formerly in the Stoclet and Swergold collections, also with an hexagonal base, dated corresponding to 651, in Osvald Sirén, Chinese Sculpture from the Fifth to Fourteenth Centuries, New York, 1925, pl. 419B; and two more figures, formerly in the Nitta Collection, now in the collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei included in The Crucible of Compassion and Wisdom, Taipei, 1987, pls 79 and 81.

Several figures in this posture bear images of Amitabha in the crown, while others like the present appear more refined with only a main jewel in the tiara. Conversely, all known figures of this type appear to grasp the ambrosia-filled bottle, the waters of which are thought to illuminate the laity with bodhi (awareness) when sprinkled using the deity’s willow-leaf or fly-whisk. Compare one further High Tang example of this type from the collection of Sakamoto Gorō, sold in our Hong Kong rooms, 5th October 2016, lot 3219.