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, by the 16th century allegorical themes had been introduced into these table settings. 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.

This figure was produced at the Meissen porcelain factory around 1745. It depicts a young black woman wearing a form of rural peasant dress, with a peaked hat and holding a basket of flowers. Black Africans offered exotic associations and were a marker of luxury in Western European households; the dress of this figure also reflects a contemporary interest in the pastoral. These objects show an orientalised fantasy of Black enslaved people who were exploited through the production of sugar, a product of the transatlantic slave. Here they are transformed into ornamental commodities and luxury products of costly porcelain which aestheticizes the exploitation of Black people during this time.