Sculpture Masterworks of the National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian (HAR Curator's Selection)

Art museums are full of great works of art. If they weren't, they'd be ethnographic or anthropological museums. But art museums have just a variety of different objects and subjects that are generally removed from their context. But we can begin to put them back into some context by grouping them together. And so if we look at the National Museum of Asian Art in Washington, D.C. It's part of the Smithsonian Museums. And they have quite a few interesting sculpture and some are famous. And by famous here, it means that they've been well-published or well-exhibited over the past 10, 20, 30 years. And with larger collections, you have to divide up the sculpture. You have to divide them up into various groups, either ethnographically or stylistically or chronologically or a specific subject. Is it a person? Is it a deity? Is it a Buddha? And so with the National Museum of Asian Art, what we've done is we've just divided them into a few easy to understand categories. And the first that we're going to do a video on is actually just a curator selection. Now, this doesn't mean the National Museum of Asian Art curators, it just means Himalayan Art Resources curators. And so what we've done is we've chosen four, just because they're very interesting. Now, these aren't the greatest masterworks, but they're within the masterworks category. And they're just very interesting and worth noting right away. And the first is a portrait bronze, a portrait sculpture of Lowell Kenshin, Sonam Gelson. Lowell Kenshin, Sonam Gelson was a very famous teacher of the late 15th. He was actually born mid-century, 15th century. And then he passed away in the end of the first quarter of the 16th century. And so we have a large image of him. And it's quite interesting because a lot of the portrait bronzes of Lowell Kenshin, Sonam Lundrup, actually try and represent his actual appearance, his face, and his body, his body type, because he's actually quite large, you would say he's a little bit rotund, he's a little bit overweight. And this is commonly depicted in his portraiture. So this is a very interesting sculpture. It does not have an inscription. What we're going on here is we're going on comparison with the very many other sculptures of him. And he's an interesting character, because during this time period of the late, really the late 15th century and early 16th century, there's two Tibetan teachers that have the most sculpture that's really made. And I mean, personalized teachers, teachers where they have a real history. They're not just copies, repeated and repeated and repeated, such as Sakyapandita, or Tsongkhapa, or Padmasambhava. These two are real people with real lives, real histories that are documented. And they are the two most common. Oh, sorry, the first is Tsongyong Heruka. He actually died prior to Sonam Lundrup, but Tsongyong Heruka, and then Sonam Lundrup. And it's kind of an enigma as to why these two teachers have so much portrait sculpture. So within the museum here, they have just a wonderful representation of Sonam Lundrup. Now going in just in order of the hard number, we have the second images of a form of Marici with one face, two arms. She's holding a bell in the right hand and what looks like a kind of a chain or a lasso in the left hand, held down across the left knee. And she's riding atop a very large sow, which is standing atop a corpse or a prone human body. This is actually a large sculpture. I can't give you the exact measurements, but it could be a foot, foot and a half or something like that. It's a large sculpture, but it does not fit into any known iconography and the style is very unusual. So right now, we're going to say that it's more on the Mongolian side of things. And what's also very likely is it belongs to a group of sculpture representing probably one large Marici sculpture and four retinue Maricis surrounding. And this sculpture will be one of the four retinue figures in the mandala of five deities. Now the next sculpture, this was published, you know, it was, it's been published quite well, and it's been really discussed. I think Ian Alsop has discussed this on the asianart.com website back in the nineties. And I think it was in orientations also publication in the early nineties. It's a very interesting donor figure, female donor figure from West Nepal, Kaseyatse region is how it's been identified. And as to the date, I'm not really sure we would have to check to see what the National Museum of Asian Art says and what Ian Alsop and what Laura Weinstein would have to say about this sculpture. But it's a it's a it's one of the best examples of what's most likely a royal donor figure that would accompany or be placed in a chapel that is supported and funded by a royal family of Nepal. Now, the fourth image is large, it's 15, 16, 17 inches tall. And it's 14th century monastic period sculpture of the wealth deity yellow jambala. And this is really quite fascinating, because it's just its size, we don't find a lot of these wealth deities such as jambala in such a large size, because jambala is also used as a when it's a small sculpture can be used as a ritual object for performing certain water offering rituals, or even sometimes milk offering rituals in Buddhism. And, and these come from India, they're not created in Tibet, they're coming out of the the Sanskrit texts of India. And then they were practiced in Nepal, especially in the Kathmandu Valley. But this sculpture is unusual, because of the base, the very bottom of the base. So what we have is we have jambala sitting on a flat platform, atop a double row of lotus petals. And beneath that, we have his right foot resting on a wealth vase. And then there's a few wealth vases to each side, I think there's a pair of wealth vases to each side. And then we have rows of male and then female deities around the bottom. So what this is most likely is this is a representation based on a larger practice of jambala that's coming out of the Siddhaika Viratantra, which is a Sanskrit Buddhist text from India. And it has jambala in the middle or vasudhara, depending on the practice. And then surrounding that can be eight or more different male and female attendants to jambala and or vasudhara. So this is a wonderful, wonderful sculpture for any kind of study that somebody is doing into wealth deities, but also into the ritual practice, but also the different forms of jambala and the development of jambala over time. So this is just a great piece to look at and look at what English translations you can find, but also in the Sanskrit, in the Tibetan, and probably in the Nehwari as well, which I'm sorry, I don't read. But in the Nehwari texts, I'm sure there would be more information on this. So these are four, just four sculpture that are just chosen as a curator's selection of interesting pieces. And we will do more videos on the other sculpture masterworks later. So we'll leave it at that. You can press the like button, you can subscribe, you can join Horror on Patreon, which we would love that if you could join Horror on Patreon and help support the work we're doing. But don't worry, you can join Horror on Patreon and you don't have to pay. There's also free videos available on that platform as well. And you can also make a donation on the homepage of Himalayan Art Resources.