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A Lladro group: a woman in a long fur-trimmed coat holding a small dog against her shoulder, a man beside her in a bowler hat with a cane. Marked LLADRO HAND MADE IN SPAIN with the 1984 copyright, and incised 1452 with the decorator's mark.
The pale grey and blue palette is the reason people know a Lladro from across a room, and it is a deliberate technical choice rather than a taste. Most European porcelain figures are decorated with overglaze enamels fired at low temperature, which gives strong colour but a surface that sits on top of the glaze. Lladro fires its colour at high temperature in a single pass, which restricts the palette severely and is why everything comes out in those soft washed blues and greys. The limitation is the look.
Look at the elongation. Heads slightly small, necks slightly long, hands slightly tapered. Lladro modellers worked from a house convention borrowed from Mannerist sculpture, and it is what makes the figures read as elegant rather than merely accurate.
The incised number on the base is the model number, and the letters beside it identify the decorator who painted it. Somebody in Tavernes Blanques was paid for this piece and the factory recorded who.
Condition: No chips, cracks or repairs found. The vulnerable points on this model are the man's cane, the woman's fingers and the dog's ears, and all are intact. Glaze is clean with no crazing. Base marked and numbered as photographed. Light dust in the moulded folds.
Ships flat rate from Baltimore via FedEx, out the door within the stated handling time. I price shipping by size rather than by scale, since I work from photographs rather than a shipping scale. Combined shipping on multiple items. Returns accepted for 30 days.
Ten percent of every sale goes to a nonprofit providing humanitarian aid in Ukraine.
Packaging is reused. Boxes and padding come from what already passed through here, so the parcel will not look new but it will arrive intact. Nothing extra is included: no cards, no plastic sleeves, no filler.
I teach for a living. Sorting and researching these pieces is how I learn, and selling is what makes room for the next batch. If you know more about this one than I do, tell me. Corrections are welcome and I will update the listing.
