Pair Itinerant Ballad Singers

Flemish man and wife, in the white. He wears an open coat, waistcoat, breeches and tricorn hat, and plays a hurdy-gurdy. She wears a sleeved dress, long apron and linen cap and carries a crib with a sleeping baby, the hood of the crib with incised decoration. Both figures on square roughly cut bases. White, compact paste. Grey-green translucency. Thick, opacified glaze concealing some details of the modelling. H. 6 in (15.3 cm).

Arrow and annulet mark incised on both.

The figures probably derived from engravings, 1737-42, of the Comte de Caylus after Bouchardon’s Cries of Paris, but  ‘reborn’ as London familiars and sold as pleasure garden mementoes. 

Provenance: Taylor Collection; Parkside Antiques, Melbourne, 1994.

Illustrated Adams and Redstone, 1981/1991, as circa 1753-56, Plate 126/132, p.198/196.  Pair, V&A, C.1485&A-1963, as circa 1752-54, enamelled in ‘muses painter’ palette, and with garbled inscriptions.

The porcelain of these figures is different from that of the slightly later, post 1750s, and the models appear to demonstrate the difficulties initially experienced by the factory in the production of figures. Much of the detailing of the figures would appear to have been made directly by hand, including the patterning on the clothes and basket and the finishing of the flowers and leaves.