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She has had solo shows at Washington’s Phillips Collection, at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art and at the Frick, where she added her own slyly subversive works as a foil to the museum’s Meissen porcelain collection.

Mrs. Getty hung the painting on a wall, behind an 18th-century English musical and automaton tower clock probably made for the Asian market, flanked by 12 Meissen porcelain figures of boys on an oil-gilt side table, and framed by a pair of George II giltwood armchairs.

His trove includes paintings by Canaletto and Meissen porcelain.

“All four,” he continued, “are wistful cantos of mutability, depictions of how even the lofty, beautiful and fabulously wealthy can crack and shatter as easily as Fabergé glass or Meissen porcelain — or, sometimes, be as tough and enduring as netsuke.”

I watched a small girl in a tulle tutu try to scale a vitrine of Meissen porcelain statuettes by Johann Joachim Kändler, particularly enchanted with one group, a fox accompanying a singer on harpsichord.