European porcelain figures like this – which show seated men dressed in exotic garments intended as East Asian – were probably inspired by Chinese models of the laughing Buddha Budai carved in soapstone or made at Jingdezhen in porcelain. They might also owe something to the engravings accompanying the Dutch traveller Johan Nieuhof’s account of his visit to China in 1655-1657, and do not appear to derive from Dehua porcelain. Somewhat similar seated figures were made at Meissen in the 1710s, and like this one, they lack the conical hat so often used by European artists to indicate Chinese ethnicity. Such figures were sometimes described as ‘pagods’, meaning ‘idols’, in eighteenth-century inventories. Some were used as incense burners and others made in porcelain or painted unfired clay had nodding heads. A figure of this general type is shown seated on a bracket and surrounded by porcelain vases in a design for a mirror to go over a dressing room mantelpiece made by the English furniture designer John Linnell in the 1750s. Porcelain figures were in production at the Saint-Cloud factory by 1731, when ‘all kinds of grotesque figures’ were mentioned in an advertisement. ‘Grotesque’ had a much wider meaning then than now, and was applied to things associated with ornamental grottoes and by extension objects that were bizarre, exaggerated or quaint.