Ludwigsburg's porcelain manufactory traces back to 1758, founded under the patronage of Duke Carl Eugen of Württemberg, and the factory kept producing figural work in its established decorative styles well into the twentieth century rather than retiring the formula once its founding period ended. This pair, made in the second half of the 1900's, shows a peasant man and woman dressed in stylised Regency-era attire, each carrying a basket loaded with autumn fruit and vegetables, a harvest scene rendered with the same pastoral idealism that German porcelain figures had leaned on for well over a century by that point.
The costumes carry polychrome enamelling throughout, with the woman's skirt and the man's blouse both hand-painted with small flower bouquets, a decorative touch that softens the otherwise practical harvest subject. Made under the historic Ludwigsburg name but well outside its earliest working decades, the pair sits closer to a continuation of tradition than to an antique in the strict sense, decorative work produced by a factory with genuine eighteenth-century roots rather than a piece from that founding era itself.
Condition notes
Very good condition. The figure holding the fruit basket has a tip of her index finger missing; the other figure has some minor losses to the flowers.
