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Features

• Region of Origin: China
• Age: Pre-1800
• Primary Material: Porcelain & Pottery
• Original/Reproduction: Antique Original

Circa 1745, diameter 9 in. (22.8cm)

See Howard & Ayers, China for the West, vol. I, p. 239, fig. 234 (1978):

With a rim painted en sepia with four panels of Chinese landscapes and birds are two Western figures in bright famille rose enamels dressed as Scottish soldiers.  The rifleman on the left has a red coat, while the piper has a jacket of rich green.  The piper is copied faithfully from the 1743 frontispiece by George Bickham A short history of the Highland Regiment.  The private is also after a Bickham drawing of the same date.  (The same piper design was still being used in 1786 for he appears again in Grose’s Military Antiquities, published that year.)  

These prints had also been sold separately at the Black Horse in Cornhill in 1743 as a ‘set’ of four by John Bowles, and it seems probable that the two were taken to China (rather than a copy of the book A short history of the Highlands Regiment).This Regiment, the 42nd Foot, amalgamated later with the 73rd regiment and became the Black Watch.  On 18, July 1743, Riflemen Farquar and Shawe, together with Samuel and Malcolm McPherson of the 42nd, were shot at the Tower of London … for their part in a mutiny.  This was the occasion commemorated by John Bowles’s set of prints.”  Those punished for the mutiny were individually and collectively described as ‘Jacobite martyrs’ at the time.