A VERY RARE LARGE FAMILLE ROSE 'EUROPEAN PROCESSION' PUNCH BOWL Qianlong period, circa 1740 Boldly enameled all around the exterior with a continuous scene of Western figures on horseback crossing a green grassy area, fancifully dressed in a range of somewhat old-fashioned-looking Western formal clothing and all mounted on multi-colored horses, the center of the interior with a roundel of exotic flowers beneath a border of flowers. 15 1/2in (39cm) diam Footnotes: 乾隆時期 約1740年 粉彩《歐洲人物遊行圖》潘趣酒碗 Published: Cohen & Cohen, The Golden Gate Collection, Antwerp, 2018, pp. 190-191, no. 140 出版： 倫敦Cohen & Cohen古董行，《The Golden Gate Collection》，安特衛普，2018年，頁190-191，圖版編號140 The scene on this extraordinary and very rare 'European subject' bowl may depict a Dutch embassy on horseback, a composition possibly inspired by Chinese scroll paintings of diplomatic missions, with a propaganda subtext of 'expected supplication'. The Dutch sent embassies to break the Portuguese monopoly on trade, with at least six such efforts undertaken between 1655 and 1685. Illustrations of embassies by the Dutch author Johannes Nieuhof (1618-1672) were very influential in the West. Nieuhof visited China in 1655 on a Dutch trade mission to the court of the Chinese Emperor, newly installed after the very damaging invasion and ensuing civil war which had more or less ended only a decade earlier. Clearly the Dutch VOC interpreted this cataclysmic political change as an opportunity to establish a more profitable trading relationship with the new rulers in Beijing and minimize or eliminate the longer-established Portuguese (based since the 1550s in Macao) as trading competitors with the Middle Kingdom. His accounts of the trip and description of China were initially published in Amsterdam in 1665 as 'An embassy from the East-India Company of the United Provinces to the Grand Tartar Cham, emperor of China'. It was accompanied by illustrations based on first-hand observations. Nieuhof's Dutch account was thereafter translated into French, German, English, and Latin; and the illustrations were widely reproduced at mixed levels of printing skill, the images sometimes appearing back to front. The information that 'An Embassy...' contained subsequently formed the intellectual basis for much 'Chinoiserie' design in the West. References: compare with the procession subject in Kina Slott, Drottningholm, Sweden, depicted on an even larger fish tank with the same decoration, illustrated by Gyllensvärd, 1990, 124; and the only other published version of this famous subject on a similar punchbowl, formerly in the Mottahedeh Collection, illustrated by Howard & Ayers, 1978, no. 229.