Corner Railing Pillar with Drinking Scenes, Yakshis, and Musicians (100s CE): Art, History and Details

Corner Railing Pillar with Drinking Scenes, Yakshis, and Musicians (100s CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This pillar reflects the influence of Greco-Roman culture on Indian art and the influence of Gandharan styles and bacchanalian themes on the art of Mathura. The pillar depicts female figures who, seemingly intoxicated, play instruments and dance. Two additional scenes are carved on the base. First, a hunchbacked woman pours wine for an obese male fertility figure (yaksha). The second scene probably illustrates the story of the horse-headed yakshi who ate her victims.

Object facts

• Title: Corner Railing Pillar with Drinking Scenes, Yakshis, and Musicians
• Date: 100s CE
• Culture: India, Mathura, Kushan period
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: red sandstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 80 x 22.9 x 24 cm (31 1/2 x 9 x 9 7/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan, Mathura
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1977.34

A detail from the museum

The celestial musicians, who play a lyre, castanets, and a triangular harp, evoke bacchanalian connotations.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• The Cleveland Museum of Art. Handbook of the Cleveland Museum of Art/1978. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1978.
• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1977.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 65, no. 1, 1978, pp. 2–43.
• Buren, Geneviève de. La chronique des arts: principales acquisitions des musées en 1977. Lausanne: Gazette des beaux-arts, 1978.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.