Chaturbhuja Mahakala (HAR 3314487)

Added: 2026-05-05

[00:00:05]Welcome to Himalayan Art Resources. My name is Jeff Watt.

[00:00:09]And today we want to talk about a particular museum in Switzerland in Basel, Switzerland called the Museum of Culture.

[00:00:17]And it I guess back in the '90s, I guess it was the early or mid '90s purchased a large collection which was the old Essen collection of Tibetan art, both painting and sculpture and ritual objects. And I think it was purchased out of Munich, Germany.

[00:00:38]>> [snorts] >> Um and this collection which is comprised of hundreds and hundreds of of objects went to Basel, Switzerland to the museum there.

[00:00:51]And it has a lot of really unique pieces, wonderful um paintings especially. It has some unique sculpture but as you probably have um learned from this site, primarily we talk about paintings because um paintings have more color, they have more more depth in terms of subject um because they have more figures whereas sculpture usually has one one figure or a conjoined couple.

[00:01:21]Very rarely you might get three three figures standing together, a triad, maybe a Buddha and two students or a Manjushri, Avalokiteshvara, and Vajrapani but it's not as often, not as common.

[00:01:35]Painting is has more to talk about really.

[00:01:40]So today we want to look at a a a painting with a long number. All of the numbers of the the Museum of Culture collection objects have long numbers. So this one is HAR number 3314487.

[00:01:57]And you know what? I can't even quite remember why we gave them such long numbers at that time but it's possible that we were we might have been also incorporating their number and we added an extra number. It's possible. I would have to go back and look.

[00:02:15]Uh one reason why we were interested in this quite early on is because the collection was also offered to Don Rubin.

[00:02:26]Uh in the early '90s it was offered to Don and Shelley Rubin.

[00:02:32]And Don thought that the collection was too big to purchase.

[00:02:37]He thought it just had too many objects.

[00:02:39]Um the the the actual cost of the collection would have been by today's standards would have been minuscule. It would have been nothing.

[00:02:49]Um and and Don should have done it. I mean in hindsight, I wasn't in New York at that time and I wasn't even working for Don Rubin at that time. This happened several years before I arrived.

[00:03:01]Um so what Don did is Don also approached a friend of his who was a collector and and talked about purchasing the entire collection and then dividing it up. Um and this was also suggested to the original Essen collection owners and they did not like that idea at all.

[00:03:20]They wanted to sell the collection as a whole for either a private collection or a museum.

[00:03:27]And so they rejected Don's offer. Um and so ultimately the Rubin Museum did not acquire part or all of this fantastic collection. It's really a shame. You know, in hindsight these are the stories you hear.

[00:03:41]But um today we want to look at this HAR number 3314487 and it's a Mahakala, one-faced, four-armed. And then it has three figures at the top. One is historical and two are uh uh other forms of Mahakala. And this is called the the um the uh uh Chatur uh Buja Mahakala which is which is four-hands, four-armed Mahakala.

[00:04:11]And at the top left we have what appears to be a yellow one-faced, four-armed Mahakala. And then with the top right we have a green. Uh this is a little bit unusual because there should be five. There should be a white and then a red but we don't have that here. Um which makes me think that possibly this painting might be part of a set or or something like that.

[00:04:37]Um Now if you look at at the immediately to the left of the central Mahakala, the large Mahakala then you have a raven-faced attendant and on the the viewer's right side then you have a one-faced, four-armed female deity.

[00:04:55]That's Charchika. That's actually the representing the consort of Mahakala.

[00:05:01]Um and then below that we have five figures that represent attendant deities from the mandala configuration. Now we don't have a mandala here, we just have random figures, a large central figure and then miscellaneous figures around.

[00:05:18]And the figure at the top center appears to be most likely Jonangpa.

[00:05:23]The Jonang tradition in in central Tibet, Ü-Tsang disappeared in the mid-17th century. So it's very likely that this is an early early 17th century painting prior to to the absorption of the Jonang monasteries into the Gelugpa, Ganden Podrang establishment.

[00:05:42]Um but what's interesting about this painting stylistically and artistically is it's very much in a Kinrey painting tradition.

[00:05:52]Now we're already going to be about 200 years, 150, 175 years away from the founding artist Kunga Drolchok and so this now is in the Kunga tradition where where you have mixtures now where they're actually incorporating elements, stylistic elements from other painting traditions and artists. But uh what we can see here is the very dark blue open sky in the upper half of the composition at the top and sides. This is very much Kinrey. And then the multicolored clouds, the yellow, the pink, the bluish gray.

[00:06:34]Also the almost complete circles of flame surrounding the especially the the top three uh deities.

[00:06:45]And then the wisps of flame around the upper halos of the two attendant figures on the right and left side of the large central Mahakala. All of this is in a very much a uh Kinrey tradition. Also below the lotus seat of the large central Mahakala we have some landscape and it's blue, green, and brown and this is very much in the Kinrey tradition as well.

[00:07:12]So this is a wonderful example of of late Kinrey style um mid-17th century, just lovely example. And we'll leave it there but we'll talk more about other Essen masterworks, really wonderful paintings in the in the Essen collection from Basel, Switzerland. So thank you very much and you can press like, you can subscribe, you can also join HAR on Patreon and you can also make a donation on the homepage of Himalayan Art Resources.