Master Art

Price: £800

A Chinese export porcelain soup plate with a river landscape panel in the style of Meissen.

For a relatively short period about 1750-70, the Chinese copied porcelains made at Meissen including these distinctive designs and borders. Most of these were themselves derived from earlier prints but have been altered and evolved in the copying, both by the European painters - and by the Chinese enamelling workshops, so that in most cases it is no longer possible to determine an original print source.
Often they show harbour scenes and may be derived from prints by Wilhelm Baur and others. Sometimes these are described as showing Peter the Great inspecting the Amsterdam shipyards, accurate examples of which are known but in most cases, as here, they are simply generic harbour scenes.

Hervouët & Bruneau 1986, Chapter 15 has a good range of such examples.