Walking Buddha (700s): Art, History and Details

Walking Buddha (700s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Small, delicately carved ivory plaques were set into wooden shrines, carved with architectural motifs. This sculpted plaque would have once flanked a central seated Buddha, with a similar standing or walking Buddha on the opposite side. The pleated garment folds derived from Greco-Roman styles adopted in the ancient region of Gandhara, west of Kashmir, where this sculpture was made.

Object facts

• Title: Walking Buddha
• Date: 700s
• Culture: India, Kashmir, 8th century
• Type: Ivory
• Technique: ivory
• Dimensions: Overall: 4.8 x 2.8 x 0.6 cm (1 7/8 x 1 1/8 x 1/4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.167

Collection credit

Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “Clothed in the Sun: A Buddha and a Surya from Kashmir.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 54, no. 2 (February 1967): 42–63.
• Tardy. Les ivoires; évolution décorative du Ier siècle à nos jours. Paris: Tardy, 1972.
• Czuma, Stanislaw. "A Unique Addition to the School of Kashmiri Ivories." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 8 (October 1988): 298–319.

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.