This thangka does not stop at Tsongkhapa's own life. Alongside its many depictions of him teaching, meeting visitors and meditating, the painting also includes Ganden, Drepung and Sera, the three monasteries he established near Lhasa, which anchored the young Gelug school's early institutional life. A founder's biography and his institution building appear side by side in the same composition, treated as a single continuous story rather than two separate subjects.
That pairing has a long afterlife. Measuring 206.1 by 338.0 centimeters, this eighteenth century painting entered the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne in 1955, a gift of the O. F. Semler family in memory of O. F. Semler, where it is now held under accession number 1533A-D4. No individual painter is named in the museum's own catalogue record, an ordinary silence for workshop thangka painting of this kind rather than a puzzle anyone has set out to solve, and not one this article treats as unresolved in any specific, closeable sense. What survives regardless is a single image doing two jobs at once: honoring the man and mapping the institutions his teaching left behind, exactly the pairing a school still organized around his monasteries, active teaching centers rather than historical monuments, would want remembered together.