Chinese Export Porcelain Pronk La Dame au Parasol Plate

This Chinese Export Porcelain Plate, Circa 1740, is decorated after a design by Cornelis Pronk, depicting an Oriental lady and her parasol-bearing attendant watching three colorful waterbirds. The plate has a honeycomb diaper border reserved with vignettes of figures and waterfowl on the rim. The painting is in underglaze-blue, iron-red, brown, and gilding. The underside of the rim is painted in underglaze-blue with seven insects.

Dimensions: Diameter: 10 1/4 inches x 1 inch

Condition: No restoration or cracks. A slight rougness in places on the rim edge.

References

A watercolour by Pronk produced in 1734-36 with a similar design can be found in the Rijksmuseum Collection; RP-T-1967-18.

The first of Pronk’s four designs ‘the lady with a parasol’ was also ordered in imari, famille rose and later from Japanese kilns. The pattern was quickly copied by the Chinese for private sale in Canton.

For further details and to see an illustration of a similar blue and white plate with the addition of border panels see David S. Howard, ‘The Choice of the Private Trader’, p. 73, pl. 53. For an imari example of this pattern see William R. Sargent, Treasures of Chinese Export Ceramics from the Peabody Essex Museum, p. 277, pl. 143.

Pronk Porcelain: Porcelain after designs by Cornelis Pronk, Exhibition Catalogue, Groninger Museum April-June 1980 C.P.A. Jorg, nos. 32 and 35.

Two plates were illustrated by Jorge Welsh & Maria Antonia Pinto de Matos in The RA Collection of Chinese Ceramics – A Collector’s Vision, T.II, no. 286-287, 170-171

La Dame au Parasol was one of several designs commissioned by the Dutch East India Company from Cornelius Pronk between 1734 and 1737. The designs appear in the famille rose palette and Imari.
The Dutch (or private individuals) also approached the Japanese to produce sample plates decorated with La Dame au Parasol in famille rose and Arita blue and white.

For a long discussion of the whole group of Cornelius Pronk designs, and the way in which they were ordered and received by the Hoge Regering at the VOC base in Batavia, see C.P.A. Jorg, Pronk Porcelain, pp. 51 and 99 -102.. According to Soame Jenyns two of the birds represented are the ruff and the spoonbill and are both natives of Holland.

(Ref: NY9833A-nmrr)