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Lot 955
A large carved and lacquered wood head of Buddha Yuan/early Ming dynasty
18 December 2017, 11:00 PST
San FranciscoSold for US$18,750 inc. premium
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A large carved and lacquered wood head of Buddha
Yuan/early Ming dynasty
The tall usnisa centering a now un-lacquered scalp bearing only traces of hair curls above crisply delineated eyebrows framing bulbous and gentle eyelids enclosing inlaid-black glass pupils separated by a wide nose above carefully rendered lips, the face framed by long pierced earlobes, the back of the skull stabilized with three rectilinear joins, now supported by a custom-made wood stand.
25in (63.5cm) height from top of head to top of stand
The tall usnisa centering a now un-lacquered scalp bearing only traces of hair curls above crisply delineated eyebrows framing bulbous and gentle eyelids enclosing inlaid-black glass pupils separated by a wide nose above carefully rendered lips, the face framed by long pierced earlobes, the back of the skull stabilized with three rectilinear joins, now supported by a custom-made wood stand.
25in (63.5cm) height from top of head to top of stand
Footnotes
Provenance
originally a private collector born in Russia and relocated to New York and California;
thereupon bequeathed to the mother of the current owner in 1955.
Another fragment of a dry lacquered wood-core Buddhist figure was offered in these rooms as lot 7086 in sale 22411 of 23 June 2015. That figure shared with the present lot numerous stylistic similarities including a wide nose, a now un-lacquered scalp beneath a prominent usnisa, delicate and sensuous lips and well-pierced earlobes. The head found on a dry lacquer Bodhisattva in the Freer Collection dated to the Yuan dynasty or earlier resembles in material and style both that earlier Bonhams example and the present lot. Denise Leidy uses this Freer Bodhisattva figure to explore at length Vajrayana and Pala kingdom influences on Chinese sculpture even before the sponsorship of the Sakya lineage by the Yuan court; see Denise Leidy and Donna Strahan Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New Haven: Yale, 2010) fig. 21, 20. She continues her survey of the Yuan period by tracing the evolving amalgam of Indo-Himalayan influences into a more classically Chinese domestic style by citing a late Yuan dynasty bronze figure in the palace Collection of Beijing (op cit. fig. 23, 21). That bronze retains a massive usnisa like that on the present lot, even as it, also like the present lot, moves towards the well-known broader early Ming faces. In discussing the construction of three Sui and Tang dynasty hollow dry-lacquer and wood-core lacquer prototypes in the Met, the Freer, and the Walters Art Museum of Baltimore, Strahan notes that, like this head, all three have black glass eyes and wood blocks inserted to the back of the head to attach now missing mandorlas (op. cit. fig 46-47, p 39).
For yet another example of a wood core dry-lacquer Yuan dynasty Buddhist figure see the example in the University Museum, University of Pennsylvania (object C405A) as cited in Sherman Lee and Wai-Kam Ho Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1968), pl. 19. Lee and Ho discuss at length the popularity of specifically the dry lacquer (ganqi) technique during the era, tracing it to the success of a single notable artisan. Paradoxically for such a turbulent historical period, similar treatment of the eyes and nose on the University of Pennsylvania example seem to give it the same serene, almost sleepy expression as found on the present lot.