Seated Buddha (200s CE): Art, History and Details

Seated Buddha (200s CE) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Artists in the north Indian city of Mathura reinterpreted the appearance of the Greco-Roman style of drapery, which was popular in the region of Gandhara, in present-day Pakistan. They preferred a more otherworldly, abstracted rendition of the folds, giving the Buddha a powerful, superhuman energy.

Object facts

• Title: Seated Buddha
• Date: 200s CE
• Culture: Northern India, Mathura, Kushan period
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: sandstone
• Dimensions: Overall: 63 x 58.5 cm (24 13/16 x 23 1/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Kushan, Mathura
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1941.94

Collection credit

Edward L. Whittemore Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Coomaraswamy, Ananda K. “The Origin of the Buddha Image.” The Art Bulletin, vol. 9, no. 4, 1927, pp. 287–329.
• Hollis, Howard. “Buddhist Statue from Mathurā.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art, vol. 29, no. 6, 1942, pp. 98, 100–102.
• Lee, Sherman E. Buddhist Art. Detroit Institute of Arts, Twenty-Fourth Loan Exhibition, October, 1942. Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1942.

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.