QIANLONG PERIOD, CIRCA 1738

In 1734 the directors of Holland’s VOC commissioned Amsterdam artist Cornelis Pronk (1691-1759) to create four patterns for Chinese porcelain. Pronk’s drawings were sent to VOC headquarters in Batavia (later Java) and then on to Canton in 1736; two survive today in the Rijksmuseum. With a Chinoiserie vocabulary Pronk created distinctive scenes and motifs that were then produced by the Chinese workshops in differing quantities of famille rose enamels, blue and white and ‘Chinese Imari’.

The third Pronk pattern has not been identified; it may have been ‘The Archer’ or ‘The Trumpeter’. But the fourth was ‘The Arbour’. But by this time the VOC was finding Pronk’s intricate patterns too costly to produce and smaller quantities were produced.