Two gray schist dishes

Stone dishes such as these represent some of the earliest surviving sculptural material from Gandhara. The dish on the right depicts a Nereid, one of the fifty daughters of Poseidon's attendants, Nereus and Doris, riding a hippocamp. The Hellenistic subject matter as well as the placement and treatment of the figures is characteristic of earlier material produced in Gandhara under the Parthian incursion in the first century B.C. For a related example in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, see K. Behrendt, The Art of Gandhara in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2007, p. 9, cat. no. 4, and for another comparable example in The Alsdorf Collection, see P. Pal, A Collecting Odyssey, 1997, p. 344, cat. no. 316.