Two gray schist dishes

GANDHARA, 2ND/3RD CENTURY

Details

Two gray schist dishes
Gandhara, 2nd/3rd century
The round dishes with a decorative band along the rim, one depicting a nude woman with raised hand reclining against a cushion with a diminutive male to her left, the other carved with a Nereid riding a hippocamp, the reverse incised with intricate design
4¼ in. (10.8 cm), the larger (2)

Provenance

Private collection, Japan, acquired 1986-1990

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Lot Essay

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.

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