This painting almost certainly derive from a larger set of twenty-eight paintings depicting the Eighty-Four Mahasiddhas, each depicting three mahasiddhas per composition, along with a single painting of Vajrahdara. The compositions are designed based on an eleventh-century text ascribed to Vajrasana, an epithet for an abbott of the monastery of the same name at Bodhgaya in Northeastern India. Another important, and possibly earlier, text describing the Eighty-Four Mahasiddhas is ascribed to Abhayakara Gupta, and is known as the Abhayadatta system. Depicted here are Kumaripa, Nilapa and Tsembupa.
Stylistically, the present paintings align closely with a style of painting developed by the fifteenth-century artist Khyentse Chenmo of Gongkar Chode Monastery, known as the Khyenri style. Famed for his fine and naturalistic depictions of his subjects and for his radical rejection of the prevailing, classic Indian and Nepalese-inspired styles with formal red backgrounds, Khyentse Chenmo enthusiastically replaced them with the vibrant greens and blues of Chinese landscapes. Khyenri paintings are also known for their exquisite attention to detail, including in the faces of the subject and attendant figures and in the accompanying flora and fauna, and for particular representations of aureoles and halos, the latter of which in mahasiddha paintings are usually perfectly circular and semi-transparent. In the present paintings, all of these indicators abound: the mahasiddhas are rendered with idiosyncratic facial depictions backed by semi-transparent circular halos and sit amidst rockwork carried out in the blue-and-green palette of Yongle arhat paintings, surrounded by a menagerie of small animals, insects, and plants, all detailed with minute precision.
Although the pure Khyenri style grew less popular by the early seventeenth century, it was integrated and redeveloped in a number of other styles, including the Karma Gar-ri style of the Karma Kagyu schools and the Palpung style developed by Situ Panchen Chokyi Jungne. While the present paintings display some aspects that can be found in these later styles, particularly the Karma Gar-ri style, with its resplendent use of Yongle-style blue-and-green rockwork, they seem to derive from a purely Khyenri source, probably a fifteenth or sixteenth-century Eighty-Four Mahasiddha Vajrasana system painting set. There are only a few known Vajrasana mahasiddha painting sets in the Khyenri style: the collection of the Rubin Museum of Art includes a painting of Kamala, Suvarnadvipa, and Viraya (acc. no. C2004.14.2), illustrated and discussed by R. Linrothe in Holy Madness: Portraits of Tantric Siddhas, New York, 2006, p. 270, cat. no. 40, and illustrated on Himalayan Art Resources, item no. 65349, that appears to be the finest and possibly earliest of the known sets of paintings. The National Gallery in Prague has three paintings, originally from the Josef Martinek Collection (inv. nos. Vm 2757, Vm 2926, and Vm 2927), illustrated on Himalayan Art Resources, item nos. 57614, 57620 and 57621; two of the Prague paintings have identical compositions to the present paintings, indicating they belong to a separate discrete set. Other Khyenri Vajrasana system mahasiddha sets are known but as of yet unpublished. The dating of all of these works have been variously attributed to as early as the fifteenth century to as late as the eighteenth century, but the consensus seems to lean towards the seventeenth century.