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Lot 237
A RARE GILT-BRONZE FIGURE OF GUANYIN
Estimated Value:
2.500 € - 3.500 €
Result:
incl. Premium and VAT
Description:
China, 18th c.H. 17 cm
Seated in rajalilasana on Mount Potala with her right hand in vitarkamudra while the left is resting on her raised left knee in varadamudra, wearing various garments including a wide-sleeved mantle, its border engraved with scrolling tendrils, necklace, her face displaying a serene expression with downcast eyes below arched eyebrows, her hair combed in a chignon set with a minute figure of Buddha to its front and covered with a veil falling down her shoulders, resealed.
Old Hungarian private collection, according to the previous owners assembled before 1970 by repute
The pose of royal ease-a literal translation of the Sanskrit terms lalitasana, rajalalitasana and maharajalalitasana, the several terms denoting the exact placement and arrangement of the legs-traces its origins to ancient India. A second-century crossbar roundel from Amaravati and now in the British Museum (1880,0709.5) depicts King Suddhodana, the Buddha’s father, so seated during a visit to Queen Maya, the Buddha’s mother, in the Asoka Grove in Lumbini, thus giving literal association to the term “pose of royal ease”. Chinese artists first employed the royal ease pose in describing Buddhist figures in the eighth and ninth centuries, as witnessed by a ninth-century portable painting from Dunhuang depicting the Bodhisattva Manjushri Seated on a Lion and now in the British Museum, London (1919,0101,0.141). And though early Chinese sculptures of Buddhist deities seated in royal ease are rare, a mid-eighth-century bronze sculpture in the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, portraying Guanyin Seated on Mount Potalaka represents the Tang interpretation of the subject (F88-37/52). In fact, according to Wladimir Zwalf, formerly a keeper at the British Museum, the earliest archaeologically attested and thus reliably datable Chinese sculpture of a bodhisattva seated in royal ease-identical in pose to that of the present bodhisattva-is a finely cast gilt bronze made during the tenth century in the Wu-Yue Kingdom in east China and excavated from the Wanfo pagoda, Jinhua, Zhejiang province A similar cold painted bronze of Avalokiteshvara is preserved in the collection of Xia Jingchun, published in ‚Buddhist Statues Collected by Xia Jingchun‘, Beijing 2004, no. 221, p. 245 - Very minor traces of age
