This pretty porcelain basket shape was one of many designed specially by the artistic director of the Sèvres porcelain factory, Jean-Claude Duplessis for the service ordered by the French king, Louis XV, in 1753. We know from surviving records that ten were included in his original turquoise ground service. The surviving examples, dated 1755, are pierced versions of the shape and would have beeen part of the central table decoration, probably filled with luscious crystallised fruits offered as part of the dessert. The baskets were made in round or lobed oval shapes (as here) and could be pierced or left whole, when they were probably used as flower holders. This example is dated 1757 and may have been included in the purchases made the Paris dealer Madame Lair of that year recorded in the factory sale records. She bought five baskets in 1757 on 31st August, and three more on 8th September.

This item was among eighty-nine pieces of Sèvres porcelain bequeathed with a collection especially rich in eighteenth-century French decorative art by John Jones in 1882. As the handbook to the Jones Collection stated in 1883: "Suddenly ... a collection has been given ... which contains the very objects so much to be desired, and, as it seemed a year ago, so hopeless of attainment." A military tailor who made his fortune during the Crimean War, Jones (1799-1882) started collecting seriously in the 1850s, sharing a taste for luxury objects of the ancien regime with aristocratic collectors such as the fourth marquess of Hertford and Sir Richard Wallace (founders of London's Wallace Collection), John Bowes, and Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild.

A pair of baskets of the same shape with a turquoise ground are in the Frick Collection in New York, and another pair are at Versailles.