In the late 1650s, following the fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 and the consequent collapse of the Chinese ceramic export trade, Dutch merchants based in western Japan began commissioning copies of Chinese porcelain from Japanese kilns. These new orders greatly boosted the fledgling potteries of Arita, which was Japan's main centre for porcelain production during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The design of this dish imitates that of Chinese 'Kraak' porcelains (a term possibly derived from 'Carrack', the Dutch term for a type of Portuguese ship) of the sort made for export to the Middle East and Europe from the 1570s onwards. The Japanese painter of this dish simplified the original Chinese design, eliminating superfluous detail to achieve a powerfully graphic effect. Japanese porcelains were considerably heavier and often much larger than their Chinese counterparts. The cobalt used contained impurities that resulted in a distinctive bright but soft blue tinged with purple or blue.

The central motif of a deer drinking from a pond appears on many large Japanese 'Kraak' dishes, several of which found their way into princely European collections, including that of Augustus the Strong of Saxony. These may well correspond to the dishes recorded as painted 'with deer' in the Dutch East India Company's order books for 1679 and 1681.