The seated harlequin is playing a ‘dudelsack’ or bagpipe made from a billy goat.

The modeller Johann Gottfried Becker arrived from Meissen in 1746 just a year after Adam Friedrich von Löwenfinck had begun experiments at Höchst. Becker had been apprenticed to Johann Joachim Kändler at Meissen and this early figure is loosely based on Kändler’s Meissen model of 1736 without the tankard that that figure holds to his mouth. A similar model was also made at Fürstenberg.

Another example with very similar decoration is in Mittelrheinisches Landesmuseum in Mainz (inv. no. 36/29 b).

Condition:
Old restoration to tip of hat and back leg of goat and the section of pipe connecting the goat to the horn

Provenance:
Christie’s Amsterdam, 15 May, 2002, lot 144

References:
Reinhard Jansen (ed.), Commedia Dell’ Arte. Fest der Komödianten (2001), p. 147, no. 145
Christina H. Nelson, The Warda Stevens Stout Collection, A History of Eighteenth-Century German Porcelain, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens, Memphis, (2013), pp. 279-82
Patricia Stahl, Höchster Porzellan, 1746-1796. Katalog zur Ausstellung Höchster Porzellan (1994), Historisches Museum der Stadt Frankfurt am Main, p. 242, no. 6.7.12

Price: £2,200