Lot Essay
Cf. D. Howard and J. Ayers, op.cit., vol.1, no.299, p.305 for a bowl with this design, where the authors suggest that the figures are wearing Ottoman costumes and that this was undoubtedly a specially commissioned design, since the shapes of pieces are those of tea-services used in England and the Continent in about 1740 and that it illustrates music played 'eastward of the Levant'. They discuss the possibility that the design may have been by Cornelis Pronk. A number of pieces with slight variations of the rim design are known, some also with thicker enamel. A coffee cup and two saucers in the Hodroff Collection, illustrated by D. S. Howard, op.cit., no.202, p.178 show two rim variations. Mr. Howard suggests that the cup and saucer with more elaborate rim decoration, which also have thicker black enamel, may well represent a first order, and due to the expense of producing this service, economies in decoration were made on subsequent orders, as shown in the second saucer. Another interesting variation is that in the majority of known examples, the musicians are facing away from each other; however the teabowl and saucer, which has particularly elaborate borders, included in the Brussels Royal Museums of Art and History Exhibition, Chinese Export Porcelain, Hong Kong, 1989-1990, Catalogue, no. 55, shows the two figures facing each other. An identical plate to the present lot, from the Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, is illustrated by F. & N. Hervouët et Y. Bruneau, op.cit., p.191, no.8.20 and a similar plate with a white rim and the trumpeter in reverse is illustrated, ibid. no.8.21; while a teabowl and saucer originally in the Ionides Collection was included in the exhibition Ancient Chinese Trade Ceramics from The British Museum, Taibei, 1994 Catalogue, no.79, pp.184 and 185; and a milk-jug and cover is illustrated by D. F. Lunsingh Scheurleer, op.cit., fig.92