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The "Chinese Figure" scenes painted on these two plates and miniature mug are almost unrecognizable as human figures seated within a natural setting. Such abstraction was common on English Chinoiserie ceramics, reflecting the fact that many pottery painters did not have direct access to expensive Chinese porcelain. Instead they borrowed Chinoiserie motifs from Dutch tin-glazed earthenwares, many of which in turn were based on Japanese porcelain copies of the original Chinese designs-a pattern of transferal that further indicates the increasingly global scale of trade at the end of the seventeenth century.