25 Underside of fig. 4 Nothing has been forthcoming to confirm the hypothesis voiced by Hans Sonntag to the effect that European copperplate engravings with East Asian motifs may have served the Meissen Manufactory as role models for the fruit designs in its early Blue Onion Pattern in 1730 or thereabouts. Sonntag reasoned that the fascination with the Blue Onion Pattern in underglaze blue that has continued unabated since the 18th century is due in particular to its handsome compositional structure, a “geometrically configured combination of circle, octagon and square”. He held that the East Asian prototypes of the Blue Onion Pattern symbolised the “Three Abundances” peach, pomegranate and fingered citron and that these had been distilled into two types of fruit in the Meissen Blue Onion Pattern.7 Some scholars8 countered that Meissen’s blue-painters had made a far more proactive contribution to the evolution of the Blue Onion Pattern. They disputed the widely held view that the fruit designs on the ledges of plates in the Blue Onion Pattern had evolved from initially three items of inward-pointing fruit taken from a Chinese prototype – a peach, a pomegranate and an onion-like melon – into four peaches alternating
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