Lot Essay
This saucer forms part of a coffee-service, on which several designs depicting aspects of human anatomy were drawn; the designs were taken from various medical books, most of which were published in Holland. On one saucer there is a reference to a work by Eleum Pira and this inscription includes the date 1761. Hervouët and Bruneau, op.cit. p. 378 have identified that the design for this saucer is taken from part of Plate XIII in Tabulae Anatomicae by Johan Adam Kulmus, published in 1731 in Amsterdam. For a further discussion on this service, see Howard and Ayers, China for the West, London and New York, 1978, vol. I, pp. 346 and 347; see ibid. no. 346 for a spoon-tray with this design, and fig. 346a for various examples from the service, which were originally in the Mottahedeh collection and are now in the Winterthur Museum, Delaware.