A Bow white porcelain group of a fortune teller, circa 1752

This group is inspired by Boucher‘s “La Bonne Aventure”, executed for the Beauvais tapestry workshop and widely disseminated through an engraving by Pierre-Alexandre Aveline. For a similar example see Elizabeth Adams & David Redstone, Bow Porcelain, London, 1981, pl. 70, discussed on p. 144. The group is attributed to the anonymous but distinctive modeller of figures at the Bow factory with the sobriquet “The Muses Modeller”, named by Aubrey Toppin in 1929 after a series of figures of the Seven Muses. Their work has a naïve charm and is characterised by relatively small heads with heavy eye lids, powerful posses with sculpted drapery. Several models are derived from engravings after Boucher, Lancret and Watteau.