Rare Tangka du Lama Shamarpa Zhwadmar VI (1584-1630) Tibet, XVIIE-XVIIIE siècle | 西藏 十七至十八世紀 第六世夏瑪巴確吉旺秋唐卡 | A rare thangka depicting Lama Shamarpa Zhwadmar VI (1584-1630), distemper on cloth, Tibet, 17th-18th century

The Berkeley galleries, 20 Davies street, London, W.1 (according to label). 

Berkeley 藝廊，20 Davies street， 倫敦， W.1（標籤）

Chokyi Wangchug (1584-1630), the sixth incumbent of the Sharma Red Hat lineage, is depicted in mountainous landscape seated on a throne wearing the distinctive red cap of the Sharmapas and holding a sutra in his hands.

Vajrayogini appears above with two devotees seated either side beneath, the lama on the left inscribed bkra shis grags and on the right Nam mkha’ ‘od. A teacher, possibly Gampopa (1079-1153), meditates in a cave above right, and two Worldly Protector deities ride through fiery landscape below.

The style of the thangka is a continuum of classic early Ming Buddhist portrait painting in which an arhat is depicted in landscape beneath a gnarled tree, such as the Yongle (1403-1424) Chudapanthaka sold at Sotheby’s New York, September 21, 2007, lot 33. By the seventeenth century, deities and monks are introduced into the simple landscape format of the early Ming paintings, cf. a seventeenth century Karmapa thangka in the Munich Ethnological Museum, see David P. Jackson, Patron and Painter, New York, 2009, p. 109, fig. 5.20.