A pair of late eighteenth-century George III Chinese export nodding head figures dressed in traditional colourul gowns and holding fans.
This wonderful pair is beautifully depicted and finished in fine detail. The figures retian much of their original decoration, the colours remaining vivid and bright.
Chinese nodding-head figures are documented in England and continental Europe as early as the 1760s and 1770s and Zoffany's famous portrait depicting Queen Charlotte in her Dressing Room at Buckingham Palace painted in 1764 shows two such figures in the background (see C. Saumarez Smith, Eighteenth Century Decoration, New York, 1993, p. 255, fig. 246).
Nodding-head figures were imported into England, Europe and America from Canton in large numbers from the 1780s. The great interest in these figures in England is derived in large part from the personal tastes of the Prince of Wales (later George IV) during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The Prince’s interest in Chinese decoration was first expressed in his Chinese Drawing Room at Carlton House, but reached its high point with Brighton Pavilion. The final achievement – an ornate palace of fantastical proportions and exotic furnishings – was due to the combined efforts of the Prince himself and his principal designers, John and Frederick Crace, in the twenty-five years after 1802 when the project was begun. A number of Chinese figures of this type were prominently displayed in the corridor of the Pavilion (see J. Morley, The Making of the Royal Pavilion, Brighton, Boston, 1984, pp. 169-176).