This design, traditionally known as ‘Governor Duff and his Wife’, depicts a European couple promenading with a hound in a Chinese garden. The scene is framed by flowering plants, rocks and a balustrade, while the border is decorated in the Chinese Imari palette with floral scrolls and groups of auspicious objects from the Hundred Antiquities.

The identity of the couple remains uncertain. They have variously been described as Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon or Madame de Montespan, a Frisian couple, or the Dutch Governor-General of the East Indies Diederik Durven—formerly misread as ‘Duff’—and his wife, Anna Catharina de Roo. No evidence supports any of these identifications however, and the composition was more probably adapted from an unidentified contemporary European, likely Dutch, print depicting a fashionable couple.