A pair of late eighteenth-century Chinese export nodding head figures depicting a mandarin and his wife, the lady wearing a robe with four-clawed dragons, signifying noble rank, amongst polychrome clouds on a salmon ground above the terrestrial diagram, crashing waves with watery spray and the lishui stripe at the hem, the male figure with turquoise robe with ruyi heads and stylised scrolling grasses, each holding a fan

Chinese nodding-head figures were first documented in England and Continental Europe as early as the 1760s, with Zoffany’s 1764 portrait of Queen Charlotte in her Dressing Room at Buckingham Palace depicting two such figures in the background. A related group of ‘twenty-four figures of Chinese burnt clay with colouring 13 inches high, representing the Emperor and Empress of China and the whole Imperial household’ are in the Royal Danish Collection.

The majority, including the present pair, were imported into England, Europe and America from Canton from the 1780s into the early nineteenth century, with the great interest in these figures in England deriving in large part from the personal tastes of the Prince of Wales and his projects first at Carlton House and then Brighton Pavilion in 1802, where a number of nodding Chinese figures were prominently displayed in the Long Gallery.

The present pair are finely painted, retaining nearly all the original spectacular polychrome decoration.