Page 87 - Chinese Art Bonhams San Francisco December 18, 2017

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that earlier Bonhams example and the present lot. Denise Leidy uses PROPERTY FROM ANOTHER OWNER
this Freer Bodhisattva figure to explore at length Vajrayana and Pala
kingdom influences on Chinese sculpture even before the sponsorship 956
of the Sakya lineage by the Yuan court; see Denise Leidy and Donna A GILT LACQUER WOOD FIGURE OF THE THOUSAND-ARMED
Strahan Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, (New Haven: Yale, 2010) fig. 21, 20. GUANYIN
Qing dynasty
She continues her survey of the Yuan period by tracing the evolving Constructed in several pieces to depict the Bodhisattva seated holding
amalgam of Indo-Himalayan influences into a more classically Chinese her primary arms in namaskaramudra above an additional pair held in
domestic style by citing a late Yuan dynasty bronze figure in the palace dhyanamudra in her lap supporting a small stupa separated by two
Collection of Beijing (op cit. fig. 23, 21). That bronze retains a massive groups of arms carved to flare out to either side below two taller arms
usnisa like that on the present lot, even as it, also like the present lot, held aloft, seated in dhyanasana, together with a likely assembled
moves towards the well-known broader early Ming faces. In discussing large throne further supported by an assembled lotus form plinth.
the construction of three Sui and Tang dynasty hollow dry-lacquer and 47in (119.5cm) total height of assembled elements
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 $8,000 - 12,000
head to attach now missing mandorlas (op. cit. fig 46-47, p 39).
A large red and gilt lacquer wood figure of Guanyin of similar size and
For yet another example of a wood core dry-lacquer Yuan dynasty facial figures was offered as lot 216 in Christie’s Amsterdam sale 3008
Buddhist figure see the example in the University Museum, University of 19-20 June 2012. A smaller Thousand-Arm example of remarkably
of Pennsylvania (object C405A) as cited in Sherman Lee and Wai-Kam similar construction but lacking a throne and a plinth was offered in
Ho Chinese Art Under the Mongols: The Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368) these rooms as lot 2154 in sale 22511 of 11 December 2015.
(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.

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