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THE COLLECTION OF THE LATE SIMON DIGBY - PART I PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF THE LATE SIMON DIGBY, SOLD BY ORDER OF THE EXECUTORS. The proceeds of the sale will go to the Simon Digby Memorial Scholarship Fund which will be used to grant fellowships and scholarships for the furtherance of studies which were close to Simon's heart. Connoisseur, collector and linguist, Simon Digby was a brilliant scholar whose extraordinary research manifested itself in dozens of learned papers and articles. Born in 1932 in Madhya Pradesh, Digby studied at Cambridge but set off to India at the age of 25 and was enrolled at the University of Delhi. He was later appointed honorary librarian of the Royal Asiatic Society and in 1972 he took on his only full-time paid appointment, as assistant keeper in the Department of Eastern Art of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Here, on a very restricted budget, he made a series of brilliant purchases of Indian decorative arts. Buying both in India and in the West, Digby built up an enormous collection of works of art, principally metalwork. Digby carefully selected his pieces for their academic interest, each of them illustrating a different aspect of a particular feature, and a number of them were loaned to V & A for their 1982 ground-breaking exhibition on Court Life and the Arts under Mughal Rule. But his interest was not limited to Indian art and his collection also includes fine pieces of Persian, Buddhist and Hindu art. Christie's is proud to offer a number of the best pieces from the Collection of the Late Simon Digby in the Art of the Islamic and Indian Worlds sale at Christie's King street, 7 April 2011 and the forthcoming Art and Textiles of the Islamic and Indian Worlds sale at Christie's South Kensington, 6 October 2011.

A CAST GILT-BRONZE FIGURE OF BUDDHA

NEPAL, 14TH/15TH CENTURY

Details

A CAST GILT-BRONZE FIGURE OF BUDDHA
NEPAL, 14TH/15TH CENTURY
Seated in the diamond attitude (vajraparyankasana) on a lotus pedestal, his right hand displaying the gesture of charity, his garment rendered in a transparent manner, a flamed aureole around
9 1/8in. (23cm.) high

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