19th C. Western Himalayan Brass Bodhisattva Maitreya with Kamandalu

Western Himalaya, Kashmiri revival style. A cast brass shrine figure of the bodhisattva Maitreya, seated in lalitasana with one leg pendant and the other folded, set against a circular beaded aureole and rising from a stepped rectangular plinth pierced with a niche. The slender body is elegantly modeled, the chest bare save for a beaded torque and looping necklaces, the lower body wrapped in an incised dhoti whose hem ripples across the throne. Heavy earrings flank a serene face crowned by a tall, piled jatamukuta, the hair drawn upward in the ascetic top knot proper to a princely bodhisattva on the threshold of buddhahood. The raised right hand cradles a bulbous, stoppered kamandalu, the water flask that holds amrta, the elixir of immortality and Maitreya's most diagnostic attribute, a quiet promise of the future buddha's advent. The lowered left hand grasps a sinuous stalk with a curling terminal, best read as the nagapushpa, the dragon-flower of the bodhi tree beneath which Maitreya is prophesied to attain enlightenment, here rendered in metal with a serpentine elasticity that has often invited misreading as a snake. The circular nimbus, ringed with a beaded border, frames the figure with the radiant authority of a portable altar piece. The patina is dark and granular, with green cuprite blooms along the recesses, the surface bearing the dignified wear of long devotional handling. The work belongs to a 19th century Western Himalayan tradition that looked back to the elegant Kashmiri bronzes of the eighth to tenth centuries, perpetuating earlier Buddhist iconography in the monastic workshops of Ladakh, Zanskar, and Lahaul, where Maitreya, the bodhisattva-in-waiting, remained an object of particular fervor. Item # 199988

Estimate:£189.18

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