Museum number
2019.183
Object
Male of a pair of white busts of Mongolians, Bow Porcelain Factory, soft-paste porcelain, c.1750
Description
with Oriental features, wearing plumed and jewelled foliage headwear and lace and feather collars, their bodices elaborately moulded with frogging in the form of strapwork, on circular spreading socles with concave bases. He 10 3/4 in high. She 10 1/2 in high.
Materials
soft-paste porcelain
On display?
No

Further description

Simple name
figurine/sculptural group
Dimensions
25.5cm (h) x 10.7cm (w)
Founded in the mid-1740s, the Bow factory, located in Bow, now East London, was the first English manufacturer to make porcelain on a commercial scale. Bow porcelain was largely aimed at the middle-classes. Famous for its imitations of imported Chinese and Japanese porcelain, the factory also produced some of the earliest full-length figures in English porcelain. From the 1760s the quality declined and the factory closed around 1774. The factory’s legacy lives on as its use of bone ash in the manufacture of porcelain evolved into what we know as English bone china.

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