Reputedly in a private collection in Thailand by the mid-1990s; thence to John Eskenazi, Ltd., London; thence acquired by Dallas Museum of Art(accession date: June 9, 2011).

REASON FOR ACQUISITION AS AN EXCEPTION TO THE 1970 RULE:
This work has provenance established to June 2011, when the DMA acquired it from John Eskenazi, Ltd., and probable provenance to the mid-1990s. This Shunga-Period vessel, in the style of excavations from Chandraketugarh, in what is now Bengal, shows an early form of the Hindu Great Goddess, or Sri Devi. It is rare in scale and quality. Texts from the Greco-Roman world indicate that the Chandraketugarh area was once a port important in trade between India and the Mediterranean. This vessel is thus significant to the DMA’s ability to exhibit objects linking the Greco-Roman West to the ancient cultures of south Asia, as well as representing a culture directly ancestral to those that produced the later Hindu sculptures displayed in the DMA’s south Asian galleries.

EXHIBITION HISTORY: DMA, October 2011 through the present.