This figure with eerily blanched face represents a European woman wearing regional dress and was clearly modelled after much earlier European prints. She was probably intended to be Dutch, although details of her dress correspond to a late seventeenth-century engraving of a Swabian (southern German) peasant. Round her neck she wears a ruff of a type that had passed out of fashion in the Netherlands nearly a century before the figure was made.

Other versions of this figure are known, from which it is apparent that she was made in a mould and hand-finished before firing, as with some slightly earlier Dehua figures that show somewhat similar style and sculptural conventions. At least one of these other versions is paired with a male companion wearing a falling collar in early seventeenth-century styles. Clearly made for export, such figures were probably intended for display on mantelpieces or brackets in western European interiors. Presumably the craftsman who modelled this piece had never seen a European woman in this or any other style of dress, the result being an image as arresting and unrealistic as many European representations of Chinese people made at about this date.