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Spotlight on the Harihara of Prasat Andet: Monday, March 17, 2025
Spotlight on the Harihara of Prasat Andet:
Regarded by scholars as a masterpiece of Pre-Angkorian art, the Harihara of Prasat Andet was given its own decorative style in tribute to its subtle and precise modelling in the latter part of the 7th century. Its home was the temple of Prasat Andet, some 30kms from Kompong Thom city and was built during the same era as much of the Sambor Prei Kuk complex of temples. At six and a half feet tall, it’s an imposing yet beautifully proportioned sculpture and has an interesting history once it was identified by EFEO’s Henri Parmentier. Initially, in the early years of the 1900s, it was exhibited in the museum only as a moulded copy of the original, as the monks at the pagoda, where the temple is situated, did not want to release it from their possession. It was not kept inside the tower but under a shelter next to the pagoda and worshipped as a spiritual Neak Ta figure. In 1916, Parmentier, in correspondence with Monsieur Faure, resident of Kompong Thom, persuaded the head monk to release the statue to the museum in Phnom Penh in exchange for compensation of a hanging lamp, two oil pots and his name on the exhibit’s label. His first request for a new fence for the pagoda worth 800 piastres was initially turned down by EFEO. The statue itself was broken into several pieces and missing its four arms. The legs were detached from the ankles and upon repair, additional support was added to the lower legs to ensure its ability to stand upright, especially as no horseshoe arch was part of the sculpture.
Prasat Andet stands on a small hillock rising above the surrounding flood plain – the temple name means ‘floating temple’ – and is highly venerated by the local population, with a legend that a sacred statue floating in the floodwaters of the rainy season landed at the foot of the hillock, similar in its tale to the legend of Wat Phnom. Perhaps that statue was Harihara. The temple is a single brick tower with a chamber and constructed in the last quarter of the 7th century, in the reign of Jayavarman I or his daughter, Jayadevi. Harihara is a combination of two gods, Vishnu (left side) and Shiva (right side), and was a popular deity in the Pre-Angkor period. This example is particularly fine, with its delicate muscles, supple limbs and slender torso wrapped in a simple incised sampot, loosely draped to form a pocket-like flap. The only way to distinguish between the two gods it represents is the styling of the headdress. The right side shows Shiva’s jatamukuta formed from twisted and looped locks and the left is crowned with Vishnu’s cylindrical miter. In addition, half of Shiva’s third eye is visible on the forehead. The face exudes a calm gaze with full lips, a moustache and elongated earlobes. Despite the slenderness of the torso, musculature is evident in the shoulders and thorax, with the upper abdomen slightly inflated, and a hint of inflexion in the right hip and left knee.
There are two other well-known Harihara statues purporting to be from the same time period. In the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, Douglas Latchford, a name that comes up all too frequently, is linked to a Harihara purchased from London gallery L & R Entwistle in 1988. The only evidence of provenance is a signed guarantee from Latchford claiming it had been in his possession in Thailand since 1968. With Latchford’s credibility in tatters regarding other high-profile sculptures, the guarantee is not worth the paper it’s written on. A second Harihara, in the possession of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, also has an unknown provenance, and was purchased in 1977 from Spink & Son, a dealer intimately connected to Latchford. Both Harihara statues are missing their arms and legs and whilst their legality is under scrutiny, eyebrows have been raised as to their authenticity as well.
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