South Asian More Asian Art, Objects and Furniture

A well carved Indian white marble Jain temple relief fragment featuring an image of a Jina, circa 12th century, Rajasthan or Gujarat, India. The Tirthan...

Antique Very Large Pair of Japanese Bronze Vases - Exquisite Meiji Period Presentation Pieces! These magnificent Japanese bronze vases, dating back to the Meiji Period and dated 190...

A fine set of ten polished brass ceremonial spears each with different and unusually elaborate symbolic spear heads representing good fortune, power and strength, long life, accomplishment. One of the few conventional spears is a rare Chinese spear with the double crescent moons either side of a elongated spear head. A Guan Dao...

A heavy and finely cast Japanese bronze mirror with longevity symbols, Edo Period, 18th century, Japan. The small, round mirror with high walls...

A rare and ancient Mamluk period Islamic handblown glass mosque lamp, Egypt or Syria, early 1500's. The lamp of diminutive form & having a flared neck with Islamic calligraphy, the g...

Late 19th-early 20th century Chinese hand decorated porcelain figure. Beautifully hand decorated Chinese porcelain figure. This stunning colorful finely detailed figurine or sculptur...

This Antique wooden Indian Temple holds a captivating history within its design. Crafted from wood, it stands at a height of 75.3 cm with dimensi...

This beautiful late 19th-century Tibetan box has an unusual trapezoidal form and is highly decorated in the Sino-Tibetan style in a palette of red, orange,...

An exceptional Indo-Portuguese colonial mother-of-pearl veneered casket with silver mounts India, Gujarat, 2nd half of the 16th century, the silver mounts Goa or probably Lisbon Measures: H. 16 x W. 24.6 x D. 16.1 cm An exceptional Gujarati casket with a rectangular box and truncated pyramidal lid (with slopes on each side and a flat top) made from exotic wood, probably teak (Tectona grandis), covered with a mother-of-pearl mosaic. The tesserae, cut from the shell of the green turban sea snail (Turbo marmoratus, a marine gastropod) in the shape of fish scales, are pinned to the wooden structure with silver ball-headed nails. The casket is set on bracket feet on the corners. The masterfully engraved decoration of the silver mounts follows the most refined and erudite Mannerist repertoire of rinceaux and ferroneries dating from the mid-16th century. The high quality and refinement of the silver mounts and, likewise, the silver nails that replaced the original brass pins used to hold the mother-of-pearl tesserae in place indicate the work of a silversmith probably working in Lisbon in the second half of the 16th century. The Indian origin of this production, namely from Cambay (Khambhat) and Surat in the present state of Gujarat in north India, is, as for the last three decades, consensual and fully demonstrated, not only by documentary and literary evidence - such as descriptions, travelogues and contemporary archival documentation - but also by the survival in situ of 16th-century wooden structures covered in mother-of-pearl tesserae. A fine example is a canopy decorating the tomb (dargah) of the Sufi saint, Sheik Salim Chisti (1478-1572) in Fatehpur Sikri in Agra district in the state of Uttar Pradesh, north India. This is an artistic production, geometric in character and Islamic in nature, where usually the mother-of-pearl tesserae form complex designs of fish scales or, similar to the dishes also made using the same technique, with the thin brass sheets and pins, stylized lotus flowers. The truncated pyramidal shape corresponds, like their contemporary tortoiseshell counterparts also made in Gujarat, to a piece of furniture used in the Indian subcontinent within the Islamic world prior to the arrival of the first Portuguese. This shape, in fact, is very old and peculiar to East-Asian caskets, chests or boxes used to contain and protect Buddhist texts, the sutras. A similar chest is the famous and large reliquary chest from Lisbon cathedral that once contained the relics of the city's patron saint, Saint Vincent. Both match in shape, having the same kind of socle or pedestal and bracket feet, and in their engraved silver mountings, featuring the same type of refined, erudite decoration. Their differences lie in the silver borders that frame the entire length of the edges of the chest (both the box and the lid), pinned with silver nails, and on the lock plate, shaped like a coat of arms in the Lisbon example. Given the exceptional dimensions of the reliquary casket...

Unusual rhombus shaped Japanese Meiji period bronze sea-life motif bonsai, bamboo planter, ikebana. The body in the form of a densely woven basket of fine detail, with a large lobster, clam shell, cockle, conch, crab, pearl oyster and whelk sculptural motifs on the sides, set upon bamboo form bronze feet. The base signed in Japanese within an ornate seal. Perfectly sized for an artistic bonzai tree...

This Antique Indian wooden temple fragment holds a captivating history within its design. Crafted from wood, it stands at a height of 39,8 cm wi...

Antique Very Large Pair of Japanese Bronze Vases - Exquisite Meiji Period Artist Pieces! These magnificent Japanese bronze vases, dating back to the 19th Century Meiji Period, showc...