A Fine Chinese Gilt Bronze Figure of Avalokitesvara Without StandThe bodhisattva is seated in rajalilasana, the posture of royal ease, with his right hand resting on his raised knee , and the left hand resting on a closed book. His hair is swept back into a topknot beneath the crown, and long plaits cascade down the shoulders. The face has downcast eyes and a serene expression. The deity wears bracelets, earrings and a beaded necklace. A shawl is draped over the shoulders and around the arms and his dhoti is tied in a bow below the waist. The hems are finely detailed with incised lotus heads on scrolling foliage.Sculptural representations of the Water Moon Guanyin gained popularity in the Northern Song period, that popularity continuing into the Liao and Jin periods, through the Yuan dynasty, and into the Ming, the majority of those sculptures carved in wood. Well-known examples are in the collections of the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City (34-10), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (28.56), Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (50.590), British Museum (1920,0615.1), Harvard Art Museums (1928.110), Victoria and Albert Museum (A.7-1935), and Princeton University Art Museum (y1950-66), among others. In addition, numerous ceramic sculptures produced in qingbai porcelain at Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, during the Yuan dynasty represent the Water Moon Guanyin, including examples in the Palace Museum, Beijing, the Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, MO (35-5), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1991.253.27), and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (C30-1968), among others. The present sculpture’s immediate predecessors are those gilt bronze sculptures depicting the Water Moon Guanyin that were produced during the Yuan dynasty. Though few in number, they descend from sculptures of the Harvard type and display a remarkable consistency in style, general appearance, and mode of presentation. In addition to the previously mentioned sculpture in the Musée Guimet, Paris (MG 10639), which, unlike the others, has a goatee, additional examples include those in the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto (991.63.1), Asian Art Museum, San Francisco (B60S566), British Museum, London (1947,0712.392) (Fig 3), and Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University (EA1956.1376). Slightly different in appearance, a bronze sculpture sold at Sotheby’s, Paris, on 11 December 2014 (lot 105) nevertheless is related and is part of the same group. Impressive and compelling, the present sculpture is rare and important, as it is one of the few gilt bronze representations of the Water Moon Guanyin from the early Ming period and likely dates to the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century. This sculpture’s style represents an evolution from that of the Yuan-period images mentioned above, and its salient stylistic features mark it as a generation later than those figures, placing it in early Ming times. The broad shoulders and leonine chest convey a new sense of majesty, for example, just as the slightly larger head, which boasts larger eyes as well as topknot of hair encircled by a crown, imparts a strong sense of personality. Moreover, though still oval, the face is fuller and the cheeks flesher than those of the earlier sculptures, the dimples that frame the mouth are deeper and more pronounced, and the earrings are larger and more emphatic, all of which hint at Tibetan influence, as do the inlays of semiprecious stones in the crown and necklace; even so, the sculpture assuredly is still in traditional Chinese, rather than Tibeto-Chinese, style. In addition, the securing of the undergarment just below the ribcage and the draping of the capelet so that it falls from the shoulder onto the right leg add visual interest to the long torso and thus imbue the figure with life. And a slightly revised arrangement of the drapery over the legs clarifies not only the position of the legs but their anatomical relationship to the rest of the body (an element that tends to be slightly ambiguous and not a little awkward in the Yuan sculptures). Despite the languid posture, the torso retains a sense of unmoving solidity, disturbed by neither overt movement nor dramatic distortion. Draping the lower body with effortless ease, the garments flow naturally and confidently, conforming to the body beneath and thus revealing both the presence and the form of that body. All of these features signal the emergence of a new and mature style that succeeds the style pioneered in the Yuan dynasty and that lays the foundation for further evolution in the Ming. Even so, with its hints of Indo-Tibetan influence—visible in the treatment of the face, for example, and in the use both of large earrings and of inlays of semiprecious stones—this sculpture anticipates the rise of the Tibeto-Chinese style. Indeed, a Xuande period (1436–1435), Tibeto-Chinese-style, gilt bronze sculpture long in a Scottish collection that sold at Sotheby’s, Hong Kong, on 8 April 2011 (lot 2839) depicts Guanyin seated in a pose of royal ease and incorporates elements drawn both from traditional Chinese styles and from the Indo-Tibetan tradition. Bearing an inscription dated to 1435—i.e., to the tenth year of the Xuande reign—the sculpture blends elements of the two styles to create a new, hybrid style and thus reveals the importance of the present sculpture in the evolution and development of Chinese sculptural styles. From the traditional style, the 1435 sculpture drew the beaded necklace and the capelet with embellished edges and long tails that envelope the shoulders and loop over the legs as well as the two-part lower garment, each plain and unadorned except for the brocaded edge at top and bottom. From the Indo-Tibetan style, the 1435 sculpture drew the compressed double-lotus base and the change of posture, from the lalitasana pose of the present sculpture to the rajalalitasana pose, a variant of the royal ease pose, in which the left leg is drawn up, knee flexed, but turned so that the leg lies flat and is perpendicular to the torso, as if the figure had been seated in the lotus position but then shifted positions and raised right knee to chest height. From the Indo-Tibetan style, the 1435 sculpture also drew the figure’s elegant proportions and sensuous air, meticulously rendered details, and relatively square face with fleshy cheeks and small features pulled toward the center. Not only rare and beautiful, this sculpture is exceptionally important as it represents the maturation of a long developmental sequence yet foreshadows the adoption of the new Tibeto-Chinese style. Alas, this sculpture’s tenure as a transition between the traditional and Tibeto-Chinese styles would be brief, as the imperial court and its monied followers came to favor Tibetan-style Buddhism early in the Ming dynasty, particularly during the Yongle (1403–1425) and Xuande eras, when the imperial court made a concerted effort to build secular and religious alliances with Tibet, even inviting Tibetan monks to the capital, Beijing, to conduct religious services, with the result that by Yongle and Xuande times, the new Tibeto-Chinese style of sculpture had come to be the most preferred, eclipsing, but not wholly pushing aside, the traditional Chinese style. W:25CM H:45CM