THE PORCELAIN CIRCA 1720, THE DUTCH COLD-PAINTED DECORATION OF SLIGHTLY LATER DATE

For an extensive history of the 'South Sea Bubble', please see the doucai-enameled Chinese export porcelain plates offered in this sale, lots 157-158, as well as additional plates of the 'South Sea Bubble' doucai type in the online component of the present Ann & Gordon Getty Collection auction series. Unlike the doucai plates, however, the present set of nine were fired in Chinese export factories and then painted in cold colors in the Netherlands, with their subject matter both similarly satirical and peculiarly Dutch. The figures at the centers of the plates derive from contemporary prints including Pasquins windkaart op de windnegotie, a deck of cards appearing in Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid [The Great Picture (or Scene) of Folly, also known in English as The Great Mirror of Folly], a wildly popular Dutch volume of prints, ballads, poems, farcical plays and more, published in December 1720 as a biting satire on the financial crashes that had shaken Dutch, English and French society.

Each card in Pasquins windkaart is designed with a variant figure and occasional lines of speech, above a caption in the form of a rhyming couplet, offering a total of 54 unique satirical views on the Bubble collapse. The present plates employ six of these designs as models, including: a street-vendor, adapted from the two of diamonds, selling eyeglasses to bankrupt shareholders who have gone blind from weeping; an allegorical figure of Time, derived from the two of spades, wearing an hourglass on his head while a brazier in his left hand turns stock certificates to smoke; and a street-sweeper, based on the ace of spades, shoveling worthless stock certificates out to sea. Interestingly, among the motifs not adapted from the windkaart is a figure of Harlequin holding a sack of coins above the caption "with time, I make money", positing a topsy-turvy world in which only the cunning trickster can stay afloat.

For a full description and interpretation of each figure, see F. & N. Hervouët and Y. Bruneau, La Porcelaine des Compagnies des Indes a Decor Occidental, Paris, 1986, pp. 382 and 384-5, nos. 16.63-16.71. Hervouët and Bruneau also illustrate a set of eight plates painted with many of the same figures but within variant borders, believed to be from the same Dutch painter or workshop (op. cit., pp. 382-3, nos. 16.55-16.62), and note that each group may once have belonged to a larger set. A full impression of Pasquins windkaart is held in the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection at the New York Public Library (object no. 30977).