The history of Prajnaparamita, Goddess of Wisdom, a twelfth-century Indian Buddhist sculpture in the National Gallery of Australia collection, has been researched and evaluated through a dedicated Asian Art Provenance Project. This article describes how the sculpture was traced from twelfth-century Odisha, India, to museums in Depression-era Brooklyn and Philadelphia, through dealers and private collectors Earl and Irene Morse, to Canberra, Australia, where it has been since 1990. Frieda Hauswirth Das (1886–1974), previously obscured from art-collecting records, is revealed as the private collector who purchased the sculpture in India in around 1930. Incidental discoveries are then documented, extending the published provenance of objects in museum collections in the United States and Europe. Finally, consideration is given to the sculpture’s changing legal and ethical position, and the collecting rationales of its various collectors. The case study illustrates the contributions provenance research can make to archeological, art-historical, and collections knowledge, and elucidates aspects of the heterodox twentieth-century Asian art trade, as well as concomitant shifts in collecting ethics.
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