Rare ‘Desenho Miúdo’ Portuguese faience bottle dating from thesecond half of the 17th century, decorated in cobalt-blue and manganeseon a lead-white enamelled ground.Wheel thrown and vertically flattened and grooved by thepotters applied hand pressure, it features a low and strangulatedneck of out flaring rim. It stands on a low, slightly set back foot.Centrally placed in opposing faces, an identical profiled exoticfigure seated on a rocky outcrop, in two distinct moments: in onedepiction looking at an object and in the other seemingly meditating.In both elevations the figure is depicted within a landscape,of characteristic ‘Desenho Miúdo’ ornamental grammar (cf.: Intro.Ch. IV), amongst flowers and trees of evident oriental inspiration,that seem like randomly sprayed onto the whole bottle surface.A fine, continuous manganese-oxide line demarcates thebottle’s upper and lower body edge, while both the neck and therim are encircled by two parallel blue bands.The painted decorative motifs, in two shades of blue, areoutlined in bluish grey manganese. From the second half of the 16thcentury onwards, when Delftware became the predominant exportfaience, there was an attempt by the Portuguese potters to likentheir production to its European congener, by introducing this newartifice of outlining decorative motifs in manganese-oxide pigment.The floral and foliage motifs portrayed in this bottle, inspiredin Chinese, Ming to Qing Transitional Period (1620–1683) porcelain,reach in this instance larger than usual dimensions, a detail that evidencesthe potter creativity, in attempting at filling the bottle surface.The rarity results not only from the provenance and theunique shape it presents, but also from the quality of manufacturingand the manganese contour, which achieves an unparalleledshade of bluish gray.