Howard Kottler began to decorate mundane household objects with mass-produced decals at the end of the 1960s. When he first began his series of plates, he made them for himself, but abandoned that process for factory-made products. In Ambitious Resident from the Blue Boy Set, Kottler cut apart the image of Jonathan Buttall from Sir Thomas Gainsborough’s famous 1770 painting, Blue Boy, and placed the pieces into two carriages, employing a collage method like the Dada artists of the 1920s.