A gilt-bronze figure of Avalokiteshvara, Liao dynasty

Japanese Private Collection.

The present figure belongs to a small group of exquisitely modelled Buddhist bronze sculptures of the Liao dynasty. One characteristic of these figures is their rounded faces and tall crowns.

The Khitan people who lived along the Liao River valley, along the frontiers of the Chinese empire, had been vassals of the Tang dynasty. Through this unstable relationship they had become familiar with Buddhism. They originally practised animistic shamanism, but according to Frederick W. Mote in Imperial China, 900-1800, Harvard, 2003, p. 82, within a few decades of the Khitans founding the Liao dynasty, Buddhism had become the most visible religion in their historical records. The Buddhist figures left by the Khitans display a continuation of Tang dynasty styles.

One reason for Buddhism's popularity among the Khitan was the religion's focus on mercy and compassion, as personified by Avalokiteshvara, known in Chinese as Guanyin. The Buddhist teaching that the taking of life was a great evil appealed to warrior societies, whose daily lives were often surrounded by killing and acts of cruelty.

A similar standing example which is ascribed a Song dynasty date is illustrated in The Crucible of Compassion and Wisdom, Taipei, 1987, p. 195, pl. 99, and an example from the collection of the Palace Museum Beijing is illustrated in Denise Patry Leidy and Donna Strahan, Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2010, p. 18. See also a gilt-bronze example sold in these rooms, 16th September 2015, lot 429.