The “Rat-Thieves” set No. 5 was produced at the Imperial Porcelain Factory in St. Petersburg in 2021. The drawing was created by Mikhail Mikhailovich Shemyakin, a famous painter and sculptor. While creating his sets and characters for Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet “The Nutcracker”, he fully immersed himself in Hoffmann’s fairy tale. Mikhail Shemyakin created a whole world inhabited by rats, in which he endowed them with human bodies, gave each of them a character, a role and a profession.

Hoffmann’s Christmas story “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” was published in the collection “Children’s Fairy Tales” in Berlin in 1816. Consequently, the author included the work in the second section of the first volume of the collection “Serapion Brothers”. He was inspired to create this work by the communication with the children of his friend Julian Gitzig. Their names — Friedrich and Clara — were changed in the book, the main characters of “The Nutcracker” Hoffmann were called Marie and Fritz.

In 2004, through the mediation of Hermitage Director Mikhail Borisovich Piotrovsky, Mikhail Mikhailovich Shemyakin began his collaboration with the Imperial Porcelain Factory. The sketches for the ballet were reproduced in porcelain forms as miniature sculptures and painted plates.

The painted design matched harmoniously with the heraldic form of the set, which was restored on the basis of a 1860s–1880s model from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum. Natural gold with engraving in semi-precious agate was used in painting.

One of the pieces in the set — a round tea saucer — has a small recess in the center. The artist applied engraved gilt bands radially along the outer edge of the rim and also in the recess in the center on the front side. In a golden and green circle in the center of the recess, there is an image of a male humanoid figure with a rat nose and tail, riding a striped two-winged insect, probably a wasp. The figure on the saucer holds the insect by the reins.

The figure has a black cylinder with a yellow stripe on its head. It is wearing a green doublet with reddish-yellow epaulets and jabot collar, blue breeches, grayish stockings and black shoes. There are greenish drops around the circle depicting the figure.