18TH CENTURY

The composition of this fine embroidery follows the style of contemporaneous Dalai Lama lineage paintings. The Dalai Lama depicted in the embroidery possibly represents Kalsang Gyatso (1708-1757), the seventh Dalai Lama, illustrated in a lineage painting in the Palace Museum, Beijing, The Complete Collection of Treasures of the Palace Museum - 59 - Tangka-Buddhist Painting of Tibet, Hong Kong, 2003, pp. 10-11, no. 7. Kalsang Gyatso wears similarly rendered robes, the famed yellow hat of the Gelupka school of Tibetan Buddhism, and is similarly shown holding a lotus in his right hand and Buddhist scripture in his left, but also carries a sword and book, two additional attributes which are typically associated with Manjushri.

The embroidery on the present panel represents the fine quality found in eighteenth-century Buddhist embroideries commissioned by the imperial court, featuring Tibetan-style Buddhist images. An eighteenth-century embroidery of similar exquisite quality, featuring a central image of Buddha surrounded by smaller figures of Ananda, Kashyapa, and Tsongkhapa (1357-1419), the founder of the Gelupka school of Buddhism, is in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 51.129.