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6. Tara Who Saves from Perils Tibeto-Chinese 18th c. Distemper on cloth 87 x 157 cm. / 34 1/4 x 61 3/4 in. |
The painting presents Tara Who Saves devotees from the Eight Great Perils (Astamahabhaya Tara), an iconographic program with roots in early medieval (c. seventh century) Indian Buddhism. The setting and the protagonists in this work, however, are c. eighteenth century Chinese, a testament to the enduring and adaptive traditions of Buddhist art. The perils from which the Saviouress protects her devotees are (clockwise from upper right): fire, poisonous snakes, the demons who cause disease, imprisonment in foreign lands (centre), bandits, drowning, and attacks by lions, and by stampeding elephants. In north India, where this iconography arose and flourished, these perils posed real dangers to medieval pilgrims and travelling merchants. 86 The painting can be compared with two later works in the Rubin Collections, which interpret the same iconography within c. early nineteenth century Tibetan artistic norms. 87 A Tibetan Jataka painting from a series said to have been commissioned by the Eighth Dalai Lama (1758-1804) of a painter from Amdo (East Tibet) interprets many of the compositional devices and landscape elements seen in Tibeto-Chinese works such as the present example in a more distinctively Tibetan guise. 88 Provenance: European private collection 86 Jane Casey Singer, "An Early Tibetan Painting Revisited: The Astamahabhaya Tara in the Ford Collection," Orientations (October 1998): 65-73. 87 Rhie and Thurman, Worlds of Transformation, pp. 205-07. 88 Rhie and Thurman, Worlds of Transformation, p. 70, fig. 30. |