Seated Buddha

The breadth and relative flatness of the face of this image, especially at the forehead, and the projecting ears, suggest that the image may have been made in the Shan state, east and northeast of the city of Mandalay. The Buddhist arts of this region are little known; scholars have hardly begun to study them.

This Buddha image resembles in some ways (B60B230), which is of a type associated with Mandalay. Both show the ripples and folds of the monastic robes (as many Southeast Asian Buddha images do not) and both have a band at the hairline. The folds shown on this image, however, are organized into patterns of moreor- less parallel lines, and appear much less naturalistic than those of the Mandalay-type image.