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, produced at Bow around 1760, appears to be a copy of one modelled by J.J. Kändler at Meissen. It depicts a young black woman wearing a form of European peasant dress and holding a basket of fruit. These objects show an orientalised fantasy of Black enslaved people who were exploited through the production of sugar, spice, tea and other luxury products during this time. Here they are transformed into ornamental commodities and luxury products of costly porcelain which aestheticizes the exploitation of Black people during this time.