These porcelain are part of an elaborate set of state china designed for President Rutherford Hayes. Guided by watercolor images of American flora and fauna by artist-adventurer Theodore Davis, French artisans decorated individual pieces by hand. Davis developed novel shapes for many of the plates in the set, and production methods used by Haviland were technologically advanced. Davis' choice of native birds, animals, and plants representing habitats across the United States symbolically united the recently war-torn nation on the President's dinner table. The Hayes china remains unique among the American presidential state dinner services. Exercising his sense of narrative, Davis chose to have ice cream served on a plate representing a Canadian snowshoe on an icy snowbank at sunset. The vivid color of this and other pieces were carefully selected to look attractive in the evening in gaslit rooms.