Provenance:
Private Collection, Paris France 2017
Condition Report available
Price on request
This object can be viewed in our gallery.
A very rare enamel on biscuit porcelain standing figure, the arms, legs and upper body decorated in aubergine enamels with black details. He stands barefoot and bare-chested, with his left hand on his hip and the right holding a yellow cornucopia. The laughing face has an open mouth and eyes, black eyebrows and a gold star on his forehead. The earlobes are pierced and may once have carried earrings. He dons a thin gold hairband holding back black tightly curled hair - similar to that seen on Chinese Buddhist figures. He wears beaded bracelets, bangles around the ankles and a gold collar around the neck. The three-tiered skirt is decorated in bight famille verte enamels with a strong blue enamel and edged in red and gold bands. The gold order sash across the body, has a central beribboned insignia.
This figure, undoubtably been made as a special private order, is likely to have been based on illustrations. It is recorded that dark skinned Africans were in China during the Tang Dynasty (618-907AD), but by the Kangxi period they were rarely seen. A direct source for this figure has yet been found, but we do know that European prints and drawings were often used as design inspiration by the Chinese potters. Perhaps even a mixture of images were used, including those of American Indians wearing feather skirts – like those representing the American continent on early maps. The attributes he carries such as the cornucopia and the sash, are of course distinctly European.
Dark skinned figures were regularly portrayed in the decorative arts in the 17th, 18th and 19th-centuries. Some of the finest examples, made around the same time as the present figure, are in the collection of the Green Vaults in Dresden. Figures by Balthasar Permoser and the goldsmith Melchior Dinglinger created, also wear feathery skirts, illustrations of which were perhaps a source for this figures’ curious attire.
One comparable figure, previously in the S.E. Kennedy Collection, is now in the Lady Lever Collection, Liverpool (acc. nr.LL6131). The National Maritime Museum (Het Scheepvaart museum), Amsterdam also has a similar figure in their collection (object no. 2018.0652). The Residenzmuseum, Munich, has two similar figures mounted as a clock and dated c.1730.
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