Displayed in the Haviland and Company stand at the Centennial Exhibition of 1876 in Philadelphia, this dish is decorated with a lightly draped female nude picking apples in an orchard. A notable object both for its subject and technique, Le Verger (The Orchard) was one of a number of pieces created at Haviland’s experimental ceramic studio in Auteuil, France, and introduced internationally at the exhibition. Also among them a pair of monumental vases and Japoniste tablewares.

Félix Bracquemond, who designed the dish, became the Auteuil studio’s first art director, in 1872. He had previously worked in the atelier of the celebrated ceramicist Théodore Deck, where he created an earlier version of Le Verger in which the female figure appears without drapery. In 1894, Bracquemond, who had become very successful as a printmaker, published a lithograph reprising, in reverse, this earlier version of the subject, now up to her knees in tall grass.