Meyer, Friedrich Elias I (1723 - 1785)

From the 1740s onwards, a real wave of imaginary exoticism invaded interiors, including Chinese items on lighter subjects like this porcelain statuette produced at the Meissen factory in Germany, according to a model attributed to Friedrich-Elias Meyer: a young Chinese woman is pouring hot chocolate with her left hand into the cup a child is holding out to her. Here Meyer used the motif from Les Délices de l'Enfance (The Delights of Childhood), an engraving by Jean-Joseph Balechou, based on a series of drawings by François Boucher, one of the main contributors to the spread of chinoiserie in the decorative arts. This was echoed in the recent introduction of chocolate, an exotic drink, in France and Germany, which was particularly popular with the elites. The genre scene presented, combining two references from “elsewhere”, is an illustration of the intra-European circulation of artistic motifs, in which engraving played a major role.