Finely decorated in the traditional Imari palette, the centre painted with a European couple, traditionally identified as Governor Duff and his wife, standing on a garden terrace beside a hound, within an elaborate floral border incorporating four clusters of the Hundred Antiques.
A plate is illustrated by David S. Howard in The Choice of the Private Trader (p. 62, no. 37), by Howard & Ayers in China for the West (vol. I, no. 127, pp. 145–146), and by François Hervouët in La Porcelaine de la Compagnie des Indes à décor occidental (pp. 152–153, pl. 7.30), with different versions and a related lacquer commode.
A large dish is held at the Cité de la Céramique, Sèvres, and published in the exhibition catalogue L’Odyssée de la porcelaine chinoise (p. 206, no. 157). Other models are preserved in the collections of the Musée Guimet, Paris; the Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels; the British Museum, London; the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
For a pair of plates, see Christie’s New York, The Hodroff Collection: Chinese Export Porcelain from the Collection of Leo & Doris Hodroff, 24 January 2007, lot 50.
For further discussion of Duff, see D. F. Lunsingh Scheurleer, Chinese Export Porcelain, London, 1974, p. 137 and fig. 203, for the design in the Rijksmuseum.
The couple has been variously identified as Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon or Madame de Montespan; as General Duff and his wife, Anna Catharina de Roo; as a Frisian couple; or simply as a wealthy Dutch merchant and his consort.
Both D. F. Lunsingh Scheurleer and M. Beurdeley agree, however, that the subject is Dutch rather than French. The composition was probably derived from a contemporary Dutch print, which has not been identified.
