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.

The convention for depicting the Four Continents as female figures was used as early as the Counter-Reformation to symbolise the worldwide spread of Catholic Christendom. The figures were given wider appeal through their inclusion in the Iconologia of Cesare Ripa, an illustrated book of emblems widely used by artists from the early 17th century. ‘Africa’ was conventionally depicted as a black woman ‘almost naked’ wearing a necklace of coral, carrying a scorpion in her right hand, a cornucopia in her left and with ‘a fierce Lion by her’. Here, Africa is depicted as a family group but with many of the ‘typical’ attributes still visible: the palm tree behind, the figures’ partial nudity, the elephant’s tusk and seated lion.