Railing Pillar with a Yakshi (Female Nature Divinity) (c. 125–50 CE): Art, History and Details

Railing Pillar with a Yakshi (Female Nature Divinity) (c. 125–50 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 would have been an upright of a stair banister, probably leading to an upper circumambulatory path of a Buddhist or Jain sacred monument known as a stupa. It has the image of a nature divinity grasping the branch of an ashoka tree with one hand and touching her breast full of nourishing milk with the other. The reverse side of the pillar is decorated with a stupa at the top and a partially damaged scene set in the architectural framework below.

Object facts

• Title: Railing Pillar with a Yakshi (Female Nature Divinity)
• Date: c. 125–50 CE
• Culture: Northern India, Mathura, Kushan period
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: red sandstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 70.5 x 17.5 cm (27 3/4 x 6 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan, Mathura
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1965.250

A detail from the museum

Flowers of the ashoka tree (saraca asoca) are bright red.

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• “Art of Asia Recently Acquired by American Museums, 1965.” Archives of Asian Art, vol. 20, 1966, pp. 84–113.
• La chronique des arts, 1966, no. 154.
• Czuma, Stanislaw. “Mathura Sculpture in the Cleveland Museum Collection.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 64, no. 3, 1977, pp. 83–114.

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.