100
A very fine limestone figure of Guanyin
Northern Zhou dynasty, dated AD 571
Height: 13 5/8 in, 34.6 cm
standing on a lotus base and supported on a rectangular plinth. The Bodhisattva wears a crown, long robes falling in graceful folds over a dhoti and leaving his feet bare, and a necklace. An ambrosia bottle, once held in his left hand, is now missing. Guanyin’s face bears a serene, benevolent expression and his head is backed by a circular lotus mandorla. The plinth is carved to the front with an incense burner surrounded by a horseshoe of lotus petals, and an inscription covers the other three sides, now worn in places and difficult to decipher, but that on the back is partly legible and appears to read: On the tenth day in the fifth month of the sixth year of Tianhe, cyclical date xinmao, Buddhist disciple [Xibeizhenhe] … mother … set up [a] tangible … jade and stone …
Formerly in the collection of Osvald Sirén, marked OS 96.
Exhibited: “Chinese and Japanese Sculptures and Paintings in the National Museum of Stockholm”, September 1933, and illustrated in the catalogue as no. 62.
Tianhe was a reign mark of the Northern Zhou, used from AD 566 to 571, the sixth year being 571 which was, indeed, cyclically the xinmao year.
Sirén illustrates a sculpture dated about 570 in Chinese Sculptures in the von der Heydt Collection, no. 24, pp. 88–9, which, like our sculpture, is made of hard grey limestone of great density, and he notes that “Statues of this heavy and broad type are known mainly from the old metropolitan area of Chang’an, where the production of Buddhist sculpture flourished abundantly under the Northern Zhou and Sui dynasties.”
For further examples, see Casler, The Path to Enlightenment, no. 40, pp. 51–2, from the collection of the Musée Guimet, also illustrated in Sirén, Chinese Sculpture: From the Fifth to the Fourteenth Century, pl. 268B; and d’Argencé, Chinese Korean and Japanese Sculpture, The Avery Brundage Collection, pl. 74, pp. 162–3.
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