A very rare painted sandstone figure of a Bodhisattva China, Northern Qi / Sui Dynasty

the stocky masculine deity finely carved in the round in stylised columnar volumes with proportionally large head, hands and feet, standing upon a circular base, dressed in long skirts falling in flattened pleats with ascending curled hems, the waist wrapped in a short apron of tight folds leaving the torso bare but for a shawl around the shoulders with long draped scarves, adorned with a studded necklace with large pendent jewel and long jeweled ribbons intersecting through a large studded medallion at the navel and looping over the knees set with coral sections, studded cabochons and further medallions, the right hand in abhaya mudra  and the left hand grasping a section of a pendent scarf, the oval head with finely carved features set in benevolent expression and gentle smile, the plain flat hair rising to an usnisha encircled by a crown of five studded medallions secured by knotted ribbons at the back and flanked by further pendent ribbons trailing down the shoulder, with ample traces of red, green, ochre and black pigments overall

Reputedly from Tianlongshan, Shanxi province
Dr. Otto Burchard & Co., Berlin (late 1920s).
Private European collection, acquired from the above and thence by descent until 1997.
Sotheby's London, 2nd December 1997, lot 24.

As the figure is carved in the round, possibly not as a component of a stele or Buddhist triad group, and given iconographic details of divinity such as the usnisha and the specific mudra, an identification of the figure with Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, who is typically dressed as a bodhisattva, is reasonable. A similar sandstone figure in the Osaka Municipal Art Museum, with a halo but with much simpler jewellery, was included in the Museum's exhibition Chinese Buddhist Stone Sculpture: Veneration of the Sublime, Osaka, 1995, cat.no.118, and is illustrated again in Matsubara Saburo, Chûgoku bukky?chôkoku shiron, Tokyo, 1995, vol.2, pl.579b.

Compare also a somewhat larger stele of related type but with different facial expression, in the Poly Art Museum, Beijing, published in Baoli cang zhen: Shi ke fojiao zao xiang jingpin xuan, Guangzhou, 2000, pp.168-173. Various details on the present figure, such as the knotted-bows in the central ribbons on the front and back of the skirts, the articulation of the crown and the looping jeweled scarves, appear to be derived from Northern Qi bodhisattvas of slightly more elongated proportions, such as a figure in the Reitberg Museum, Zurich, illustrated by Siren, Chinese Sculptures in the von der Heydt Collection, Zurich, 1959, no.27, and another formerly in the Earl Morse Collection, exhibited Eskenazi Ltd., Ancient Chinese Sculpture from the Alsdorf Collection and others, London, 1990, no.5, previously sold, Parke-Bernet Galleries, May 27, 1944, lot 819. Osvald Siren notes op.cit., p.94, the likely Shanxi province origin of the von der Heydt figure, and compare also p.112, nos.38 & 39, two sandstone heads from the Tianlongshan complex.