Porcelain figures were made early on at Meissen, most notably the figures of chinamen by Georg Fritzsche (c.1725); but it was not until the 1730s that it became a staple product, under the skills of the modeller Johann Joachim Kaendler, who developed the genre into the vast array of animated figures that we are familiar with today. It was he who created the vast array of shepherds, shepherdesses, commedia dell’arte figures who peopled the dessert as a substitute for the real characters that had appeared after dinner in the centuries before. The earliest date from about 1735 and the precise date of the modelling of many of them is known from the Taxa, the record of work that Kaendler kept for the years 1740-45. Kaendler’s intention in his treatment of them is avowedly satirical, and the figures misbehave with a licence and frivolity that could only have been countenanced at the light-hearted dessert court.

However, sugar sculpture was not abandoned, and the Saxon Hof-Conditorei continued to list wooden moulds for producing ornaments to be used alongside figures in the new fashionable medium. By the second half of the century, when porcelain factories spread across the whole of Europe, most factories were producing ceramic dessert ornaments, sometimes as complete sets made for important aristocratic patrons. The most famous and artistically fine are perhaps the commedia dell’arte figures produced at Nymphenburg by Franz Anton Bustelli (1723-63), who worked at the factory from 1754. His origins are uncertain; his name suggests an Italian or even Swiss origin, possibly from the Ticino region, but he cannot be certainly connected with anyone listed in local records. The sequence of his works can be reconstructed by a factory lists from 1755 onwards and the price-list of 1767. All these figures are modelled with a maximum of panache and expression, which hovers on the borders of baroque satire and rococo exuberance. His greatest work was the series of commedia dell’arte figures of about 1760 which rank amongst the major achievements of 18th porcelain modelling. However, Bustelli seems to have got little credit for the exuberance of his figures, and died neglected in 1763.

As the century progressed, desserts came to be artistically and intellectually ambitious, and copied the formal gardens of the period. Figures became increasingly sculptural in style and began to consciously copy garden sculpture rather than the gaudy coloured work of the confectioner. Kaendler is recorded as modelling a series of figures of Apollo and the Graces for Frederick the Great of Prussia in 1743-4. In 1745 Kaendler, assisted by the modeller Eberlein, copied in porcelain a fountain with statues which had been erected in Brühl’s garden by the architect Zacharias Longuelune and the sculptor Lorenzo Mattielli. A version of the ensemble survives in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and reproduces the Dresden fountain with considerable fidelity in white undecorated porcelain. It is not always clear how such elaborate confections could be brought into the dining-room, but smaller decorations would have been brought in on mirrored trays. This arrangement would appear to be confirmed by one of the few surviving depictions which show an eighteenth century table layout with figures, the feast at the wedding of Joseph II and Isabella of Parma at Vienna in 1760.

In the 1750s more allegorical subjects became popular, such as groups of Gods and Goddesses, the Four Seasons, and Five Senses. Such figures became standard items of tableware throughout Europe. The Englishman Horace Walpole, in The World for February 8th, 1753, wrote on the changes that had taken place in garden design, which were reflected in the dessert course:

Jellies, biscuits, sugar plumbs and creams have long since given way to harlequins, gondoliers, Turks, Chinese and shepherdesses of Saxon china. But these, unconnected, and only seeming to wander among groves of curled paper and silk flowers, were soon discovered to be too insipid and unmeaning. By degrees whole meadows of cattle, of the same brittle materials, spread themselves over the whole table; cottages rose in sugar, and temples in barley-sugar; pigmy Neptunes in cars of cockle-shells triumphed over oceans of looking glass or seas of silver tissue, and at length the whole system of Ovid’s metamorphosis succeeded to all the transformations which Chloe and other great professors had introduced into the science of hieroglyphic eating. Confectioners found their trade moulder away, while toy men and china-shops were the only fashionable purveyors of the last stage of polite entertainments. Women of the first quality came home from Chenevix’s (a fashionable china-dealers) laden with dolls and babies, not for their children, but for their housekeeper. At last even these puerile puppet shows are sinking into disuse, and more manly ways of concluding our repasts are established. Gigantic figures succeed to pigmies, and of the present taste, Rysbrack, and other neglected statuatories, who might have adorned Grecian salons, though not Grecian desserts, may come into vogue.