D2501. Blue and White Charger

Painted in the center with a Chinese man wearing a broad hat and a voluminous robe, holding a flag and seated on a small elephant standing between a leafy bush and a precipitous cliff, the rim with five Chinese figures at various pursuits alternating with three large birds, two of them perched on a rock before flowering plants and the third perched on a prunus tree, the reverse with eight stylized Chinese symbols within alternating large and small panels.

 

DIMENSIONS
Diameter: 37.8 cm. (14.9 in.)

PROVENANCE
The Kitty Valkier-Schreurs Collection, Belgium;
Aronson Antiquairs, Amsterdam

NOTE
While often associated with the exoticism of Africa and Asia, the elephant’s presence in Europe has a long history. The first elephant recorded in northern Europe was brought to Colchester, then the British capital, by Emperor Claudius during the Roman invasion of Britain in 43 AD. Slightly earlier, the twenty elephants in the army of Pyrrhus of Epirus, which landed at Tarentum for the first Battle of Heraclea in 280 BC, are mentioned in Plutarch’s Lives (46?-120 AD) and by Livy (59 BC-17 AD), who also records the 37 elephants in Hannibal’s army, which crossed the Rhone River in 218 BC during the Second Punic War.

As an expensive curiosity, elephants occasionally became diplomatic gifts between European rulers, who treated them as pets or as prizes for their menageries. One such pachyderm was given in 1255 by Louis IX of France (1214-1270) to Henry III of England (1207-1272) for his menagerie in the Tower of London. The first elephant to appear in England since Roman times, the king’s celebrated elephant was drawn from life by the English historian Matthew Paris (1200?-1259) for his Chronica Majora and was further immortalized in a carving on a contemporary misericord in Exeter Cathedral. According to legend, King Henry’s elephant died in 1257 from imbibing a surfeit of red wine, but not before inspiring the “Elephant and Castle,” a heraldic device on the coat of arms of the Cutlers’ Company of London, founded in the thirteenth century, and later lending its name to a district in South London.

The elephant has never lost its appeal as an exotic wonder. Through the eighteenth century, it continued to capture the interest of artists across Europe, including Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669), whose drawings of an elephant, circa 1637, are held in the collections of the British Museum in London and the Albertina in Vienna. Elephants also appear on seventeenth-century Dutch Delft tiles; a 26-cm (10-inch) Delft polychrome bowl from 1610-30, painted with an elephant in the center, possibly “borrowed from an engraving of elephants by [the Antwerp artist] Abraham de Bruyn” (1540-1587), is illustrated by Scholten 1993, p. 53, no. 45.

SIMILAR EXAMPLES
A charger decorated in the center with two Chinese figures and an elephant, surrounded by a Chinese Transitional-style paneled border on the rim, is housed in the Zeeuws Museum, Middelburg (inv. no. AB 989). It is illustrated in Jörg 1983, p. 157, no. 103, who also illustrates, on p. 66, no. 9, a Chinese Transitional ‘kraak’porcelain dish, circa 1630-40, which likely served as the inspiration for this type of decoration. The same dishes are also illustrated in Jörg 1984, p. 151, no. 103, and p. 66, no. 9, respectively. Another dish with central elephant and figure decoration, featuring a border of alternating panels of figures and flowers, dating from circa 1660-80, is illustrated in Aronson 2006, p. 24, no. 18. A similarly posed elephant, featured in a different scene, is depicted on a charger in the transitional style, held in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art (inv. no. 2015-90-1).