Sukhothai, 15th century Buddha Image

In late 2005, dur­ing a trip to Bangkok, we vis­ited the Prasart Museum on the out­skirts of the city. This con­tin­u­ally expand­ing museum is the real­iza­tion of Prasart Vongsakul. His life­long love of Thai antiq­ui­ties matched with his years of being a suc­cess­ful busi­ness­man allowed him to ful­fill his dream. As he puts it so eloquently,

The Prasart Museum is the real­iza­tion of my dream to house in one place pre­his­toric arte­facts, Bud­dha images, stat­ues of Brah­man gods, pot­tery, Thai fur­ni­ture, Thai paint­ings, and Thai and Chi­nese porce­lains, as well as objects from other parts of Asia and elsewhere.

I took a num­ber of pho­tographs with my lit­tle Nikon Coolpix 4500. Pho­tographs were not allowed inside some of the build­ings. This photo of a Bud­dhist image was taken in the inte­rior of the chapel. Every build­ing on the prop­erty is a repli­ca­tion of some form of tra­di­tional Thai archi­tec­ture. This chapel was built to repli­cate a Rat­tanakosin style viharn, or ser­mon hall. The viharn is the most pop­u­lar build­ing at a Bud­dhist Wat, open to everyone.

William War­ren in The Prasart Museum — Trea­sures of Thai­land, 1990 offers a descrip­tion of this image as follows,

“This image, in the atti­tude of Sub­du­ing Mara, was prob­a­bly made in the satel­lite city of Kam­phaeng Phet at a time when the polit­i­cal power of Sukhothai had already suc­cumbed to the ris­ing force of Ayut­thaya. This is a post-classic image and although the pro­por­tions of the body are still those of the golden period of Sukhothai art, the face is some­how less spir­i­tual than those of the clas­sic period. Other styl­is­tic dif­fer­ences are the more elon­gated pro­por­tions of the flame and the equal length of the fingers.”

Tagged as: Buddha, Buddha image, Buddhist art, Prasart Museum, Sukhothai