Ninth Karmapa, Wangchuk Dorje (1555-1603)

This painting depicts Wangchuk Dorje, the Ninth Black Hat Karmapa, head of the Karma Kagyu School of Tibetan Buddhism. A partly effaced inscription suggests that this painting was executed during the Ninth Karmapa’s lifetime, which is also supported by a small visual clue in the painting’s background. Just over the right shoulder of the central figure a monumental image of the Buddha can be seen unfurled on a mountainside. This is a depiction of a famous appliqué scroll of Buddha Shakyamuni, which was made at the Karmapa’s home monastery, Tsurphu, for the Ninth Karmapa in 1585.

The Encampment (Gardri) artistic style, a popular painting tradition that combined Tibetan and Chinese aesthetics, took shape in the court of the Ninth Karmapa, and while no examples of the early Encampment style painted by the tradition’s founder, the great artist Namkha Tashi, have as of yet been identified, this painting is as close as we can come for now. Stylistically it marks a distinct departure from the previous tradition of depicting the Karma Kagyu School lineage. It has a more open composition and naturalistic sense of receding space, a trait that characterizes later Encampment paintings of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.