Footnotes

斯里蘭卡 十九世紀 釋迦及門徒三尊像

Provenance
Private Collection, Florida, acquired in Sri Lanka, 1996

Literature:
Two other groups of panels painted in the same 19th-century Kandyan style, including an intact shrine box, are held in the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, acc. no. 2005.176 & 2007.1.


The panels of this colourful triptych were once conjoined to form three walls of a single shrine box. The central panel depicts Buddha enthroned, with his right hand in a gesture of expounding the Buddhist Dharma (vitarka mudra). Buddha is flanked by his chief disciples kneeling before him, Shariputra and blue Maudgalyayana (Pali: Suriputta and Moggallana). The two disciples are pictured below grand lotus flowers. Arising from murky waters, the lotus is a ubiquitous Buddhist symbol of any creature's ability to achieve enlightenment despite the circumstances of their past. Left and right side panels depict a total of twelve enlightened arhats who have each sown a sprouting lotus by also explicating the Buddhist Dharma. The triptych's arrangement of a central Buddha image flanked by arhats follows a schema developed for image halls of Dambulla and the surrounding region, such as Talava Rajamahavihara and Omalpe Purana Vihara (Bandaranayake, The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka, Colombo, 1986, p. 183 & 197, pls. 94 & 107).

Stylistically, the triptych's vibrant palette, figurative shapes, and repeated arhats in a three-quarters profile are idiomatic of the Sri Lankan painting tradition developed for late-18th- to mid-19th-century murals at Dambulla, which remains the largest painted shrine in Sri Lanka, and one of the most vividly polychromatic shrines in the Buddhist world. The subjects, narrative techniques, and colour palette of Kandyan painting provided direct inspiration for Sri Lanka's most distinguished artist of the 20th century, George Keyt (1901-1993).