The earliest porcelain figures were made for the dessert course of grand dinners and replaced the sugar paste and wax figures made since medieval times for royal feasts. Originally intended as expressions of dynastic power and to celebrate political allegiances, allegorical themes had been introduced into these table settings by the 16th century. By the 18th century many were entirely decorative. Meissen in Germany was the first factory to make porcelain figures for the dessert. It set the sculptural conventions followed by porcelain factories elsewhere.

In the 1760s, at the Chelsea, Bow and Derby factories, porcelain figures acquired a leafy bower or ‘bocage’ and moved from the table to the mantelpiece where they have remained. This figure, produced at Bow around 1760, appears to be a copy of one modelled by J.J. Kändler at Meissen. It depicts a young black man in a turban and tunic holding a serving dish of fruit. Black Africans offered exotic associations and were a marker of luxury within the English home. At least 10,000 people of the African diaspora are estimated to have been living in 18th century England, most working as enslaved people used as exoticised motifs as domestic servants for elite families. For their affluent owners these people of the African diaspora were othered and aestheticised, presented as homogenous status symbols who were used to make their hosts look cosmopolitan and global in appearance. This ceramic figure represents a highly exoticised, racist and homogenous view of Africa from a male-dominated colonial Western perspective.