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, one of a ‘Pair of Moors’, was produced at Derby around 1770-75. It depicts a black woman in richly decorated clothes wearing a headdress to which three feathers are attached. Her right arm is raised and she holds an apple in her right hand. Black Africans offered so-called exotic associations and were a marker of luxury in Western European households, however these objects show an orientalised fantasy of Black enslaved people who were exploited through the production of luxury products such as tea, spice and sugar, all products of the transatlantic slave. Here they are transformed into racist ornamental commodities and luxury products of costly porcelain which aestheticizes the exploitation of Black people during this time.