Vegetable Store of the Spanish East India Company

Vegetable bowl. Compañía de Indias, 19th century.
Glazed porcelain.
Measurements: 15 x 37 cm.

Vegetable jar with a blue-and-white porcelain lid, possibly from the 19th-century East India Company, featuring a raised pineapple-shaped knob and geometric blue decoration with a small central motif on the lid.
The “East India Company” was a generic term used to refer to companies that managed trade between a European metropolis and its colonies. Chinese manufacturers soon realized that Europeans were not connoisseurs of porcelain and began producing a type for export—commonplace, even flawed—yet in the eyes of Westerners, these pieces are considered true works of art. Once trade was regularly organized, the East India Companies provided Chinese artists with European models, both for shapes and for decoration. Throughout the 18th century, the blue-and-white series persisted, though of inferior quality; it was then called Nanjing porcelain.