Modelled as a dancing couple, clasping each other's hands and balancing on one foot as they look over each other's shoulders, the other foot raised in the air behind them, the lady with two long dark plaits, on a mound base
6¹⁄₈ in. (15.5 cm.) high

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Lot Essay

A similar example was sold Christie's London, 16 November 2010, lot 135 and is illustrated by Vanessa Sigalas and Meredith Chilton, All Walks of Life, A Journey with the Alan Shimmerman Collection, Meissen Porcelain Figures of the Eighteenth Century, Stuttgart, 2022, pp. 467-470, where Sigalas suggests that the model was likely a collaboration between Johann Joachim Kändler (1706-1775) and possibly Johann Gottlieb Ehder (1716/17-1750).

Traditionally this group has been described as the Dutch or Tyrolean dancers, however contemporary descriptions differ, see Ingelore Menzhausen and Jurgen Karpinski, In Porzellan Versaubert, Basel, 1993, pp. 136-7, Kändler's Taxa for 1743 records '1 Groupgen wie ein Arlequin mit einem dergl. Weibel miteinander Pohlnisch tanzen'. Three versions of this model were made, the first modelled by Eberlein in 1735 with two later revisions by Kändler. This model proved so popular that it was copied by both the Chelsea and Bow factories and also by Chinese potters in the Qianlong period. See the similar model illustrated by Yvonne Hackenbroch, Meissen and other Continental Porcelain, Faience and Enamel in the Irwin Untermyer Collection, London, 1956, fig. 84.