Tea bowl and saucer decorated with a European lady and her attendant. China, Qianlong

The tea bowl and its saucer are decorated in the famille rose palette, features a design of figures in the European style. It depicts a young woman seated beside a low table, upon which rests a sugar bowl. She holds a saucer in one hand and a cup in the other. A young black servant, dressed in a striped jacket and topped with a plumed turban, approaches carrying a coffee pot. The rim of the pieces is decorated with a garland of flowers.

Provenance

From a French private collection

Related works

For a small tray and a saucer, see Brigitte Nicolas, Café, plaisir au goût d’amertume, 2022, p. 148/149.

For another saucer, see François et Nicole Hervouët, La Porcelaine des Compagnie des Indes à décor occidental, 1986, p. 130, no. 6.45.

Notice

In the eighteenth century, slavery was prohibited in the kingdom based on the edict of 1315, which stipulated that “according to the law of nature, everyone must be born free” and that “throughout our kingdom, servants shall be granted freedom.” Nevertheless, starting in 1716, a relaxation of this prohibition allowed for the entry of enslaved individuals onto metropolitan territory for the purpose of vocational training, without granting them freedom, for a duration of three years, at the end of which they were to be sent back to the colonies. This requirement was seldom respected, and many individuals of color, particularly young children, found themselves in situations of servitude within French households.

The source of the decoration of this tea bowl and saucer remains unidentified to this day. A variant of this design exists on Chinese porcelain featuring Chinese figures, produced around 1735-1740. A painting by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty depicting Madame du Barry, the mistress of King Louis XV, along with her servant Zamor, illustrates the same iconography. The floral garland motif on the wing is a decorative pattern particularly favored on export porcelain for the French market during the latter half of the eighteenth century.

Starting in the early seventeenth century, coffee consumption spread across Europe through ports trading with the Levant, particularly Marseille. The French crown encouraged coffee cultivation in its colonies in the early eighteenth century to compete in a burgeoning European market against the arabica coffee production from Java, controlled by the VOC (Dutch East India Company). Coffee plants were imported to Bourbon Island as early as 1715 and subsequently to the Caribbean. The adoption of this beverage was further promoted by the numerous qualities attributed to it in various compendiums. The coffee ritual became a symbol of luxury in the eighteenth century and was closely associated with porcelain.