A RARE TEA TRADE TEABOWL AND SAUCER

CIRCA 1745

Details

A RARE TEA TRADE TEABOWL AND SAUCER
Circa 1745
The bowl painted on one side with a Chinese tea merchant and a Western trader seated in the anteroom of a factory observing Chinese workers pouring out tea from baskets and packing it into the wooden crates which would carry it back to Europe, other Westerners watching their work closely, this repeated on the saucer and the other side of the bowl with another tea-packing scene, a Westerner to one side and on the other two Chinese smoking pipes before a table set with a teapot (2)

Provenance

Christie's London, 26 July 1976, lot 150

Lot Essay

With the enormous significance of the tea trade - accounting for as much as 70 percent of the Dutch East India Company's annual purchases with gross profits as high as 100 percent - to the prosperity of China traders it is remarkable that this subject is so rare on Chinese export porcelain. See K.I. Choi, Jr., Tea and design in Chinese export painting, The Magazine Antiques, October 1998 for a discussion of the Chinese watercolor albums whose compositions inspired this decoration on porcelain.