A thangka of Shri Devi, Western Tibet or Western Himalayas, 16th century | 藏西或西喜馬拉雅 十六世紀 吉祥天母唐卡 

Collection of Lionel (1943-2017) and Danielle Fournier.

Christie's Paris, 12th December 2018, lot 32.

Lionel (1943-2017) 及 Danielle Fournier 伉儷收藏

巴黎佳士得2018年12月12日，編號32

Shri Devi raises the right hand clasping a vajra danda club and holds a human skull kapala in the left. The protector goddess wears a flayed human skin cape over the shoulders tied by an arm and leg, a garland of severed heads and a tiger-skin loin cloth, and is adorned with gold and human bone jewelry, a peacock feather and crescent moon headdress, with a snow lion and a serpent appearing from behind the ears. The deity rides side-saddle, atop a mule draped with serpents, talismans, and the flayed skin of her son, striding across a sea of blood led by Shri Devi’s attendant Makaramukha and followed by the lion-faced Simhamukha. A shrine is depicted behind amidst gray smoke and flames, with a peacock feather canopy above. A mounted entourage surrounds the goddess in the upper, left, and lower registers, with Gelukpa hierarchs above, a patron and the protector deity Yama Dharmaraja below.

A compelling stylistic comparison may be made with a fifteenth or sixteenth century Tibetan painting of the guardian deity Kshetrapala, see Christie’s New York, 3rd October 1990, lot 119 (Himalayan Art Resource item no. 92055). The gods, mounts, and attendants display a similar wild intensity and the otherwise featureless dark background of each painting is decorated with the same red flower-like motif. The Kshetrapala was collected by Walter Koelz during an expedition to the western Himalayas in the early 1930s, and a similar regional provenance may be ascribed to the Shri Devi painting. Shri Devi’s distinctive crown style, consisting of a thin projection rising from a circular foot above the skulls, is typical of the region, as seen on wall paintings at Thiksey Monastery, Ladakh, published in the exhibition catalogue Collecting Paradise: Buddhist Art of Kashmir and Its Legacies, Block Museum of Art, Evanston, 2014, fig. 3.30. Compare also the common regional style of lotus pedestal depicted on the Thiksey murals featuring distinctive ruffled petals, similar to those on the seat of the Geluk lama to the right of the peacock feather canopy above Shri Devi’s shrine. A common tradition of western Tibetan painting in this period is the depiction of a consecration scene in the lower register. In the Shri Devi example, a patron monk is seated next to two altar tables with ritual offerings: compare the cabriole leg design of the altar table on a fifteenth century western Tibetan Mahakala thangka in the Michael and Beata McCormick Collection, ibid., fig. 3.25.

The hierarchs depicted in the upper register affiliate the painting with the Gelukpa order of Tibetan Buddhism, which became increasingly influential in western regions of Tibet in the latter half of the fifteenth through the sixteenth century. The Geluk order has traditionally worshipped Shri Devi in her role as dharmapala, the only female protector of the Buddhist faith in the Tibetan pantheon.