Derby Porcelain Figure of Africa, From the Four Quarters of the Globe, After the Chelsea Model by Joseph Willems Circa 1765–1770

Details

Description

Derby Porcelain Figure of Africa, from the Four Quarters of the Globe, After the Chelsea Model by Joseph Willems
Circa … Read more Derby Porcelain Figure of Africa, from the Four Quarters of the Globe, After the Chelsea Model by Joseph Willems
Circa 1765–1770

This large Derby porcelain figure of Africa comes from the factory's series of the Four Quarters of the Globe, also known as the Four Continents, and belongs to the earliest Derby version of the models, produced on a plain flower-encrusted mound base during the patch-mark period. Africa is personified, as Cesare Ripa prescribed in his Iconologia, by a young black boy wearing an elephant's-head headdress, painted pale yellow, its trunk curling up over his forehead and its ears falling to either side. Around his neck he wears a necklace of branching red coral. A cloak of pink lined in turquoise and edged with gilding is suspended from his right shoulder on a narrow strap and gathered about his hips, leaving his torso bare.

In his raised right hand he holds up an iron-red scorpion, and with his left he supports a white cornucopia filled with ears of grain and small blue flowers, the two attributes signifying the continent's venomous creatures and its natural abundance. He stands on his right leg with his left foot raised and planted on the back of a white lion, which crouches at his side with its head turned outward, its mouth open and colored iron-red, and its muzzle, brows and paws touched in puce and pale brown. The circular mound base is applied with flowers in pink, blue, white and yellow among green leaves. The flat underside of the base shows the three patch marks characteristic of Derby figures of this period.

At nine and a half inches the figure holds its own on a mantel, console or bookcase shelf, and its black enamel, pink and turquoise read strongly against dark lacquer, painted paneling or a plain colored wall. It stands comfortably alone, or among other 18th-century English porcelain, brass and tortoiseshell.

Dimensions
Height: 9½ inches (24.1 cm)
Diameter: 4½ inches (11.4 cm)

Marks
Unmarked, as is usual for Derby figures of the patch-mark period. The flat underside of the base shows three patch marks, the unglazed traces of the pads of clay on which the figure was supported in the glaze kiln.

Provenance
The Collection of Pierre Durand, New York
The Chinese Porcelain Company, New York
Earle D. Vandekar of Knightsbridge

Pierre Durand (died 2021), a financier born in Lima, founded The Chinese Porcelain Company in New York with Khalil Rizk in 1984 and directed the gallery after Rizk's death in 2001. The present figure stood on the black-lacquer chinoiserie table in the bedroom of his Fifth Avenue apartment when the apartment was photographed for New York Social Diary in 2011.

Historical Context
Personifications of the four parts of the world were codified by Cesare Ripa in his Iconologia, first published in Rome in 1593 and illustrated from 1603. Ripa's Africa is a dark-skinned figure crowned with an elephant's head, wearing a coral necklace, holding a scorpion in one hand and a cornucopia of grain in the other, with a lion at her side, and this formula passed by way of prints and Baroque sculpture into the sets of porcelain Continents modeled at Meissen by Kändler, Reinicke and Meyer around 1745–1750. In London, the Chelsea sale catalogues of 1755 and 1756 already listed groups of Europe and Asia and of Africa and America, and around 1758–1760 the factory produced a set of Continents of extraordinary size, some thirty inches high, attributed to its principal modeler, the Flemish sculptor Joseph Willems (c. 1715–1766). These figures, the largest English porcelain figures known, were sold at Christie's in 2003 and are regarded as the prototypes of the standard-sized Chelsea and Derby models.

Derby had its own version of the four figures in production by about 1765, each child accompanied by the animal or emblem of its continent: Africa with the lion, Asia with a camel, America with an alligator, and Europe crowned, with orb and scepter. The earliest issue, to which the present figure belongs, stands on a plain mound base encrusted with flowers and carries the patch marks of the glaze firing; from the 1770s the same figures were set on pierced scroll bases lettered in gilt with the name of the continent, and the models were still offered as the Four Quarters of the Globe in the factory's price list at the end of the century. The series was made in more than one size, the largest, about twelve and a half inches high, being represented by the sets at Winterthur and the Birmingham Museum of Art. See less