Reflection and Enlightenment: Chinese Buddhist Gilt-Bronzes from the Jane and Leopold Swergold Collection

Reflection and Enlightenment: Chinese Buddhist Gilt-Bronzes from the Jane and Leopold Swergold Collection

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 3519. A gilt-lacquered bronze seated figure of Maitreya Tang dynasty | 唐 鎏金銅彌勒佛坐像.

A gilt-lacquered bronze seated figure of Maitreya Tang dynasty | 唐 鎏金銅彌勒佛坐像

Auction Closed

October 12, 12:42 PM GMT

Estimate

300,000 - 500,000 HKD

Lot Details

Description

A gilt-lacquered bronze seated figure of Maitreya

Tang dynasty

唐 鎏金銅彌勒佛坐像


sensitively cast in the form of the future Buddha Maitreya seated in characteristic position with right hand held in abhaya mudra and left hand resting on the knee, the deity’s face set in a meditative expression, depicted with robe draping over both shoulders and cascading into a voluminous lower garment while exposing both feet, the deity’s ushnisha incised with interspersed swirling patterns

h. 9.5 cm

Collection of Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), circa 1920.


阿南達．庫馬拉斯瓦米（1877-1947年）收藏，約1920年

Leopold Swergold, Thoughts on Chinese Buddhist Gilt Bronzes, 2014, Aventura, cat. no. 21.


Leopold Swergold，《Thoughts on Chinese Buddhist Gilt Bronzes》，2014年，圖版21

This sensitively cast figure depicts Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, in characteristic seated position with right hand in abhaya mudra and left hand on the knee. A stylistically similar figure in the Ivan Hart Collection is illustrated in Hugo Munsterberg, Chinese Buddhist Bronzes, Tokyo, 1967, pl. 15, also attributed to the high Tang period. 
The present figure was originally in the collection of Ananda Kentish Muthu Coomaraswamy (1877-1947), the Tamil polymath who was arguably the first historian to interpret Indian art for a Western audience, and served as the first Keeper of Indian art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston from 1917 to 1947.