Vintage Cecilia The Carnation Maiden Figurine – Franklin Mint, Sculpted by Lladro Artist Fulgencio Garcia, Handmade Porcelain Spain, 1980s

A young woman holds a handful of pink carnations, two more tucked in the basket at her feet, her pale delft-blue dress and apron scattered with tiny flowers. She is Cecilia, The Carnation Maiden — and if she looks like a Lladró, there is a good reason.

She is not one. The base reads Cecilia · The Carnation Maiden · Limited Edition Fine Porcelain, a Franklin Mint issue rather than a Lladró. But she was modelled by Fulgencio García, one of Lladró's own early and most celebrated sculptors, who later worked for the Franklin Mint — so the elongated neck, the bowed head, the little slipper under the hem and the hand-built flowers are the real Lladró vocabulary, from the hand that helped invent it. A collector's-brand piece with a genuine pedigree, which is worth saying plainly: the hand of a Lladró master, under the Franklin Mint name.

The carnations are the thing to see — built petal by petal by hand and assembled, the finest and most fragile work on the piece. The soft blue-and-white is fused into the glaze in a single firing, the way García would have done it in Valencia.

Made in Spain. For the Lladró-style collector, a lover of flower figures, or anyone who values the sculptor over the label.