Beginning in the fifteenth century there was a gradual shift in Tibetan art from an Indic-centered aesthetic toward a more Chinese-centered one. This shift reflects the disappearance of Buddhism in India and Tibet’s increasingly close cultural, economic, and political ties to its northeastern Mongolian and Chinese neighbors.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, newly emerging Tibetan painting styles in Central Tibet were named after famous indigenous masters and artistic centers rather than adopted traditions such as Eastern Indian, Kashmiri, or Nepalese. These new styles, including the Menri, Khyenri, and Gardri, were known for their integration of Chinese-inspired landscapes and corresponding shift to increasingly green and blue palettes of malachite and azurite.
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Kham Province, Eastern Tibet
late 18th century
In 1750 Situ Panchen (1700–1774) commissioned twenty-seven paintings of major tantric deities from the master artist Jeto Tsewang Drakpa of western Kham. Situ personally designed each painting and took special care to ensure that their proportions agreed with the systems prescribed in the Kalachakra and Samvarodaya tantras, the classic Indian scriptures that served as the ultimate authorities on iconography.
This is the first painting of that series, with White Chakrasamvara depicted as the main figure. This piece is an example of a painting method unique to the painters of the Encampment Style, in which the artist builds up the landscape by applying successive layers of blue and green pigment in dry dots using the tip of the brush. Instead of a unified composition, the figures here seem pasted into the landscape, a pastiche of visual references from earlier figural styles, such as Khyenri, and decorative designs in a Chinese-inspired blue-green landscape.
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