A blue and white Pronk 'Arbour' plate

CIRCA 1739

細節

A blue and white Pronk 'Arbour' plate
Circa 1739
Finely painted in underglaze blue with a lady seated in a garden pavilion with two attending servants and three children in the foreground by a pond with ducks, the well and rim painted with twelve shaped panels of fruit, flowers and insects reserved on a trellis-pattern ground interspersed with shell and palmette motifs (base crack, small rim frittings)
23 cm. diam.

拍品專文

Cornelis Pronk (1691-1759), was a designer appointed to the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in 1734, 'to make all the designs and models to our satisfaction, of all such porcelain as will be ordered from time in the Indies...' This design was made in 1737 and was the fourth and last drawing he made for the VOC. It was sent to Batavia by the Heeren XVII in 1738 and received in Canton in 1739. See C.J.A. Jrg, Pronk Porcelain, pp 34-37 for a discussion on this design; ibid, colour pl. IX and cat. no. 48 for a similar example in the Groninger Museum. Jrg explains that the earlier designs are reported to have 'proved quite expensive and for this reason they did not dare to have the whole quantity made as had been requested'. It was probably for this reason that this design was only made in underglaze-blue and white, and in famille rose enamels.
See also Howard & Ayers, China for the West, vol. I, p. 301, no. 295.