South Asian Art, Virginia Museum of Fine Arts

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts is home to one of America’s premier collections of Greater Indian and Himalayan art, featuring spectacular examples of sculpture, paintings, architecture, textiles, and decorative art.

Highlights – Art Of Greater India
This collection showcases the diversity of regional cultures and religious traditions that have defined the Indian subcontinent’s artistic production over more than 3000 years. From sublime sculptures and stunning paintings, to opulent textiles and glittering decorative arts, it is filled with masterpieces that both delight and educate.

Page from the Nasir al-Din Shah Album: Portrait of a Mughal Woman
This sumptuous folio is from an imperial Mughal album produced during Shah Jahan’s reign and reportedly taken to Iran after Nadir Shah’s 1739 sack of Delhi. The collection is now named after the 19th-century Iranian ruler under whose auspices the folios were variously altered. Only during Shah Jahan’s reign did Mughal paintings begin to feature women as independent subjects. Dressed in fashionable garments, this Mughal lady stands in a grassy field of flowers against a bluegreen backdrop. The painter dwells on sumptuous textiles, transparent robes, and delicate flowers. His extraordinary attention to such eye-catching minutiae conceals the rather generalized and impersonal quality of the depiction. Women in other Shah Jahan-period portraits are almost identical in appearance, and it is likely this is a portrait of an ideal woman rather than an individual.

Manikkavachaka
In addition to images of deities, South Indian sculptors also created depictions of important Hindu saints-men and women whose exemplary lives and compelling teachings inspired devotees. The subject of this sublime imageis Manikkavachaka, a singer-saint whose rhapsodic devotional hymns proclaim his deep love for the god Shiva. He raises his right hand in a teaching gesture, and in his left he holds a manuscript (presumably of his hymns) that is inscribed “Namashivaya” or “Hail to Shiva.”

Dance of Shiva and Kali

Howdah (Elephant Saddle)
This spectacular object is a howdah, a thronelike saddle placed on the back of an elephant. Opulent silver-clad howdahs were popular with the princes who ruled British India’s small states between the 18th and 20th centuries. Seated high atop an elephant on a mobile throne was the grandest—and safest—way a ruler could move through the throngs at lavish public processions marking coronations, royal birthdays, and other dynastic events. Part of an Indian ruler’s display of grandeur, state howdahs were often outrageously showy works of art intended to overwhelm, delight, and entertain.

Tree-of-Life Palampore

Highlights – Art Of The Himalayas
The arts of Nepal and Tibet are represented through an impressive assemblage of paintings, sculptures, book arts, textiles, and ritual objects spanning nearly eight centuries. Most of these artworks relate to the region’s dominant religious traditions, Buddhism and Hinduism, both of which came to the Himalayas from India.

Shakyamuni Buddha with Two Bodhisattvas, Thirty-Five Buddhas of Confession, and Seventeen Arhats

Green Tara and Attendants
This dazzling image—fashioned from multiple metals in layer upon layer of rich elaboration—is a masterpiece of Tibetan craftsmanship and artistry. It depicts the Buddhist goddess Tara, a universal mother who nurtures and protects seekers on the spiritual path. Shown in her popular form of Green Tara, she sits on a three-tiered lotus blossom, one leg down in the posture of ease. Smaller lotus blossoms rise to frame her benevolent face, and she holds her hands in the gestures of charity and teaching. Her youthful body is adorned with gilded ornaments and clinging textiles decorated with minute copper inlays. Blossoms emerging from the sides of her spectacularly complex lotus pedestal support the Bodhisattvas Avalokiteshvara and Maitreya. Two acrobatic serpent deities, or nagas, climb up the sides of this teeming, organic structure to offer Green Tara treasures. Between them sits White Tara, and a third form of the goddess is concealed with the pedestal’s scrolling openwork.

Serpent King (Nagaraja)
This dynamic image of a serpent king, or nagaraja, was probably once part of a much larger composition. Shown in a pose of adoration, he was likely positioned at the base of a large Buddha image or reliquary stupa in a Nepalese or Tibetan monastery. At once kneeling and floating in air, he raises his hands in supplication, ready to offer up the treasures of the earth and its waters. Richly gilded and studded with gemstones, a multiheaded cobra hood emerges from behind his crown. The style of this image is associated with the great monastery at Densatil in south-central Tibet, where a group of highly elaborate reliquaries was built between the 13th and 17th centuries. The gilded copper images and friezes of these stupas, destroyed during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, resemble Nepalese products of roughly the same period and were probably sculpted by Nepalese craftsmen working in Tibet.

Krishna: The Blue-Skinned Lord
An avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu, Krishna descended to Earth to kill the evil king Kansa. Indian literature and art is filled with depictions of his mischievous youth, heroic encounters with demons, and romantic dalliances that are metaphors for his devotees’ emotional relationships with God. Blue skinned, usually in a saffron-colored loincloth and a peacock-feather crown, the young lord often carries a flute that, when played, enchants all who hear it.

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, United States
The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, or VMFA, is an art museum in Richmond, Virginia, in the United States, which opened in 1936.

The museum is owned and operated by the Commonwealth of Virginia, while private donations, endowments, and funds are used for the support of specific programs and all acquisition of artwork, as well as additional general support. Admission itself is free (except for special exhibits). It is one of the first museums in the American South to be operated by state funds. It is also one of the largest art museums in North America. VMFA ranks as one of the top ten comprehensive art museums in the United States.

The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, together with the adjacent Virginia Historical Society, anchors the eponymous “Museum District” of Richmond (alternatively known as “West of the Boulevard”).