Plate

A Chinese plate painted with this exact composition must have served as a model for the painters at the Bow factory in England, for a Bow plate in the Museum’s collection (2014.600) is decorated with precisely the same composition executed in a very similar palette. Surprisingly, one is able to match a piece of British or European porcelain with a Chinese prototype relatively rarely, and it is even more unusual to find an original model that has been copied with such fidelity. This Chinese plate makes an extremely interesting comparison with the Bow example, and both the similarities and slight differences between the two are instructive, as it reflects both the type of Chinese porcelain being imported into England in the second quarter of the eighteenth century and how chinoiserie-decorated porcelains were marketed to English consumers in the middle decades of the eighteenth century.