Extremely rare plate with erotic decoration, chinav18th century c.1740

China Order for the West
Very rare porcelain plate with erotic subject, decorated in famille rose enamels with a European woman with her breasts exposed, caressing the head of a monkey sitting next to her and offering it a piece of fruit with her right hand, set against a hilly landscape with a castle.
18th century Qianlong period circa 1740
Diameter 23 cm.

This model is catalogued as extremely rare by François and Nicolas Hervouët, La porcelaine des Compagnies des Indes à décor occidental, sujets littéraires, anecdotiques, satiriques et historiques, Flammarion, 1986, p. 137, no. 6.63.

The monkey, an ambivalent figure in the eighteenth-century Western imagination, symbolised lust, exoticism and social satire. The pictorial genre known as ‘singerie’ (from the French singer, to imitate) exploited this theme by depicting monkeys imitating human behaviour in a humorous and often critical way.

The decoration on this plate is directly inspired by an engraving by Edme Jeaurat (1688-1738) entitled Dame jouant avec sa guenon (circa 1710), known for the erotic connotations implicit in the woman/monkey interaction.