Central Asian Caravan Woman Rousing her Camel While Nursing
Original Language Title騎駱駝哺乳婦人俑
CultureChinese
Date8th century C.E.
MediumEarthenware with unfired coloring
DimensionsOverall: 16 × 18 × 11 inches (40.64 × 45.72 × 27.94 cm)
Credit LinePurchase: the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts--Commerce Bank, Trustee, and Hall Family Foundation Endowment for the Oriental Department
Object number2002.7
On View
On viewGallery Location
- 229
Collections
DescriptionA Western Asiatic woman, who is nursing a baby at her bare left breast, sits astride a kneeling Bactrian camel between its two humps. The plump-proportioned woman has distinctive Turkic facial features, modeled full cheeks, sunken small eyes, hooked nose, and pout lips. She wears the high cap, pants, and boots convenient for nomadic life. She raises her right hand as if pulling the camel's rein, and curves her left fist as if to grasp the reins, even while she holds the baby in her left arm. The suckling baby wears split pants that charmingly expose its naked bottom. The open-mouthed camel is modeled with fur on its head, under its arched neck, on its humps, and around its front legs. It wears a fringed saddle blanket with criss-cross patterns, cut to let the humps through. The heavy load on the sides of its humps consists of a fringed blanket covering hinged slates of wood, under which bulky rolled-up blankets or tent equipment are suspended by two poles fastened by ropes. The load is tightened by painted and incised girdles crossing the neck and body of the camel. The group of figures is painted in ochre, red, black, and orange.Gallery LabelHomely details captured as an instant in motion give this burial sculpture vividness and charm. Particulars of costume and face indicate that she is Turkic, not Chinese. In the caravan world, her role was to care for the family.The intensity of concern of her facial expression is matched by the truculent dismay of the came, registered in the reared head, startled wide eyes, screaming mouth, and straining neck. A cord once ran from her upraised right hand to the camel's nose. Projecting front and back from under the saddle blanket are the hinged ends of a yurt frame over which would have been draped panels of felt, seen here rolled up between the yurt frame and the camel's side. Clay models such as this were only intended for burial to accompany the deceased in the afterworld.
John Eskenazi, Ltd.;
Purchased from John Eskenazi, Ltd. by The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO, 2002.
“Tang Ceramic Sculpture,” Eskenazi Ltd. (London: Eskenazi, 2001), 26, no. 8 (repro.).
Deborah Emont Scott, ed., The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art: A Handbook of the Collection, 7th ed. (Kansas City, MO: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 2008), 322, pl. 119 (repro.).
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Ceramics: highlights from the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Museum, 2016), 15 (repro.).
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