The painting in the center of this plate shows a garden landscape with a gentleman and his servant. According to Chinese pictorial convention, the gentleman is probably a scholar. In China, the deer at his side is regarded as the mount of the immortals and an auspicious symbol of long life. It is not possible to tell whether the immortal riding the deer is the scholar himself due to the blurred depiction.

Blue and white porcelains of this type were the first to be exported in large numbers to Europe from the Jingdezhen porcelain center in central China from the late sixteenth century onward. The plates, produced in different sizes, are characterized by the circle of decorative frames on the wide, curved lip of the plate, which surround the central motif in the well of the plate. The lively, but also less carefully applied motifs reveal that this type of porcelain catered to a market that was less sophisticated than the upscale domestic Chinese market. The chips on the rim of the plate caused by firing errors are also typical. Despite such imperfections, porcelain such as this was highly prized and expensive throughout Europe. Shortly afterward, numerous European faience manufactories, such as Delft, produced copies of these precious imported items.

In the Netherlands, the center of European trade with East Asia from around 1600, such porcelains were known as “Kraakporselein.” The term probably goes back to the massive Portuguese and Spanish transport ships (caracca, from the Arabic qaraquir) that brought the first of these East Asian imports to Europe.