J.J. Lally & Co., Oriental Art / New York City, New York
MenuPast Exhibition
Ancient Chinese Tomb Sculpture
March 22 - April 10, 2004
20.
A PAINTED WOOD FIGURE OF A MILITARY OFFICIAL
Tang Dynasty, A.D. 7th Century
shown standing attentively, wearing a tiger's-head headdress and long robes with deep sleeves, his midriff covered with a wide sash and his hands folded under a muff, the face carved with 'foreign' features including an aquiline nose, and with black-painted thick eyebrows and a black moustache over red-painted lips, the back and lower section dry and deteriorated.
Height 15 1⁄8 inches (38.4 cm)
Compare the fragmentary painted wood head of a Central Asian figure, described as a court official, with bulging eyes and large nose, excavated in 1985 from a Tang dynasty tomb at Yanchi in Ningxia province, northwestern China, illustrated in an excavation report in Wenwu, 1988, No. 9, p. 51, fig. 16.
A sancai-glazed pottery standing figure of a man in armor wearing a similar tiger’s-head headdress, excavated in 1990 at Hongqing in the eastern suburbs of Xi’an, was included in the special exhibition at the Dayton Art Institute, and is illustrated by Li Jian in the catalogue, The Glory of the Silk Road: Art from Ancient China, Dayton, 2003, p. 174, no. 89, where she notes the foreign influence of the tiger’s-head headdress, which is “…a classic attribute of the Mediterranean demi-god Herakles.”
Several fragments of painted wood tomb figures including the heads of male and female figures in court dress, the head of a Central Asian, the legs of horses, and the head and torso of a lokapala, all discovered in 1985 in Tang dynasty tombs at Yanchi in Ningxia province, northwestern China, are illustrated in an excavation report in Wenwu, 1988, No. 9, pp. 43-56.
A pair of wood figures of female attendants in the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art – Atkins Museum of Fine Arts, Kansas City, exhibited at the Portland Art Museum in 1976, are illustrated by Donald Jenkins in the catalogue entitled Masterworks in Wood: China and Japan, Portland Art Museum, 1976, pp. 28-29, no. 8, dated to the Sui dynasty, circa A.D. 600.
A simple carved wood figure of a courtesan of the so-called ‘fat lady’ type, with traces of painted decoration in black and colors, excavated from a Tang site in Qinghai is illustrated in A Selection of the Treasure of Archeological Finds of the People’s Republic of China 1976-1984, Beijing, 1987, no. 376.
Compare also the three Tang dynasty painted wood figures shown in the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts and illustrated in the catalogue entitled Ancient Chinese Sculptural Treasures: Carvings in Wood, Kaohsiung, Taiwan, 1998, cat. nos. 38-40.
20.
A PAINTED WOOD FIGURE OF A MILITARY OFFICIAL
Tang Dynasty, A.D. 7th Century
Height 15 1⁄8 inches (38.4 cm)