Paul Scheurich was born in 1883 in New York and died in 1945 in Brandenburg. He studied at the Berlin Academy from 1900 to 1902. During his prolific career, he created models for the Schwarzburger Werkstätten in Unterweisbach, from 1910 to 1911; for the Berlin factory from 1912 to circa 1918; for the Nymphenburg factory, in 1914; for Meissen, from 1913 to 1937; and, again, at Berlin after 1938.
Perhaps his most outstanding works, and certainly the best known, are those which he created for the Meissen factory, of which this is a distinguished example. During the last years of the Nineteenth Century, continuing into the Twentieth, a new artistic energy at Meissen captured the prevailing mood, producing a new repertoire of figures and groups, to which Scheurich contributed 102 examples.
Here, Scheurich has arrested an elusive incident in the interplay of two figures, portraying a fleeting emotion with a grace and harmony which recalls the work of his predecessor, Franz Anton Bustelli and with a sense of humour and drama reminiscent of the harlequins created by Johann Joachim Kändler. The sparseness of decoration serves to emphasise the sense of movement and the concentration of colours on the Moor heightens the exotic.
Cf. Hermann Jedding, op. cit., p.131, no. 185; see also Gloria Ehret, Porzellan, p. 61, for a similar group of a lady with a Moorish boy