A large polychrome wood head of Avalokiteshvara, Jin / Yuan dynasty

Collection of Hofrat Alexander Koch (1860-1939), Darmstadt.

Dr. Fritz Nagel, Mannheim, 19th November 1935, lot 49.

Private collection, Bavaria.

A closely related polychrome-painted carved wood figure of a bodhisattva attributed to the Jin dynasty in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is published in Denise Patry Leidy and Donna Strahan, Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New Haven, 2010, A49; and a very similar wood figure of a bodhisattva, also from the Jin dynasty, is in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, exhibited and published in Masterworks in Wood: China and Japan, Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon, 1976, cat. no. 13.

Additional wood sculptures of this subject and style include a carved wood bodhisattva probably produced in the Northern Song dynasty, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, acc. no. 33.116; a Yuan dynasty carved wood figure of Guanyin in the collection of the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, obj. no. B60S8+; a Jin dynasty carved wood figure of Guanyin exhibited in Ancient Chinese Sculptural Treasures: Carvings in Wood, Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Kaohsiung, 1998, cat. no. 6; a Yuan dynasty carved wood figure of Guanyin from the Sauphar Collection, Paris, published in Leigh Ashton, An Introduction to the Study of Chinese Sculpture, London, 1924, pl. LXII; and another Yuan dynasty wood figure of Guanyin in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, obj. no. 59-70.

See also a Jin dynasty gilt and painted wood figure of Guanyin sold at Christie's New York, 16th September 1999, lot 21; and a painted wood figure of a bodhisattva, from the collection of Francisco Capelo, sold in the same rooms, 19th September 2006, lot 136.

Hofrat Alexander Koch (1860-1939) was a publisher and art collector who initiated the artists' colony in Darmstadt.