INNER MONGOLIA, DOLONNOR STYLE, LATE 18TH CENTURY

The present work was likely created in or around the thriving Buddhist center of Dolonnor in Inner Mongolia. During the Qing period, the Kangxi, Yongzheng, and Qianlong Emperors patronized Dolonnor as a center of Buddhist learning and artistic production. The site was purposefully built not far from Shangdu (Xanadu), the old thirteenth-century summer capital of Kublai Khan. The Mongolian lama, master artist, and leader of the Khalka Mongols, Zanabazar, formally assimilated his khanate into the Qing Empire before the Kangxi Emperor at Dolonnor in 1691. It continued to be an important bronze image foundry even into the late nineteenth century, as noted by the Russian explorer Nikolay Przhevalsky on one of his expeditions to Mongolia in the 1870s (N. Przhevalsky, Mongolia, London, 1876, p. 105). Compare the drapery and bodily proportions of the present figure with another gilt-bronze figure of Eleven-Headed Avalokiteshvara in the collection of the British Museum, illustrated by W. Zwalf in Heritage of Tibet, London, 1981, p. 43, fig. 17.
Himalayan Art Resources, item no. 24553.