1917?

Untitled (Nature Spirit [Yakshi])

American (born Ceylon), 1877 - 1947

One of the great art historians of the first half of the twentieth century, Coomaraswamy was raised in England but spent some years in South Asia, where he became connected with Rabindranath Tagore and his circle. He later served as Keeper of Indian Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Coomaraswamy produced this illustration of a nature spirit for one of his books. It depicts a sculpture carved into a railing that once encircled a second- to first-century BCE Buddhist stupa (reliquary mound) at Bharhut in north-central India. British archaeologists unearthed the railing in the late nineteenth century and reassembled it in the India Museum in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where it received considerable public attention.