Seated Buddha (1000s): Art, History and Details

Seated Buddha (1000s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Eleventh-century western Tibet experienced a period of fervent reconstruction of Buddhist monasteries following the persecution of Buddhism during the 9th and 10th centuries. Art from Kashmir was avidly collected and copied as part of those reconstruction efforts. Kashmiri stylistic traits, such as the pinched waist and abdominal musculature seen in this rare wooden image, are from that critical time. The pioneering Italian Tibetologists Giusseppe Tucci and Egenio Ghersi discovered this sculpture during an expedition to Tibet from 1933 to 1935

Object facts

• Title: Seated Buddha
• Date: 1000s
• Culture: Western Himalayas, possibly Ladakh or Lahul
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: painted wood
• Dimensions: Overall: 54.6 cm (21 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Tibetan Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1986.6

Collection credit

Andrew R. and Martha Holden Jennings Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1985.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 73, no. 2 (February 1986): 26–71.
• "1992 Annual Report." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 80, no. 6 (July 1993): 215–295.
• Rhie, Marylin M., Robert A. F. Thurman, and John Bigelow Taylor. Wisdom and Compassion: The Sacred Art of Tibet. New York: Tibet House New York in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1996.

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.