Among the largest porcelains produced by the Meissen factory near Dresden, these life-size goats display numerous fire cracks that attest to the enormous technical challenge they presented to an industry still in its infancy. In 1710, under the sponsorship of Augustus the Strong of Saxony, Meissen was the first European factory to produce hard-paste porcelain successfully. To house the factory's best products as well as his celebrated collection of Chinese and Japanese porcelains that had inspired the Meissen experiments in porcelain-making, Augustus planned a palace-museum in Dresden, for which he commissioned hundreds of life-size white porcelain animals and birds, including these goats. The furnishing of the palace was left unfinished at Augustus's death in 1733, but the factory continued to supply porcelain animals to his son and successor Augustus III. Most of the figures delivered to the palace remained there, save for those sent abroad as gifts by the Saxon heads of state and those sold from the Saxon state collection in 1919, which may include the present she-goat. Katherine B. Hiesinger, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p. 137.