Like a great many eighteenth-century English porcelain figures, this copies a group made at the Meissen in Germany. The Meissen original was modelled in 1735 by J.F. Eberlein, who based his design on a print showing a pair of Tyrolean (Austrian) peasants dancing, but changed the man's peasant clothing for masquerade dress. The Meissen factory remodelled it at some point before 1751, when the man’s ‘domino’ (carnival) mask was added. Chinese potters also made copies of the group with both masked and unmasked male dancers, and the Bow factory also made a version, in which the man lacks the mask (see C.14-1951 and C.50-1959 respectively). Curiously, when examples of the Chelsea version were included in factory auctions in 1755-1756 they were described as representing ‘a Dutchman and his wife dancing.’ Some years earlier the manager of the Chelsea factory, Nicholas Sprimont, had drafted an undated letter to the British government complaining about the sale of Meissen porcelain in England at a time when its imporatation for resale was illegal; but it is also known that he was keen to capitalize on its ready availability by making copies. Many of the early German and English porcelain figures were made as table decorations for the dessert course of grand meals, in which capacity they replaced those that had earlier been made of confectioner’s sugar or wax. The English collector and antiquarian Horace Walpole famously commented in 1753 on the fashion in England for table decorations of ‘harlequins, gondoliers, Turks, Chinese, and shepherdesses’ of Meissen porcelain. Such porcelain figures could be set out with temples and other fanciful architectural features on mirrored plateaux decorated with parterre (formal garden patterns) created in coloured sand or confectioner’s sugar.