Vintage Cherished Teddies Mother Figurine – A Mother's Love Bears All Things, Green Dress Sun Hat, Enesco Hillman 624861, Early 1993

The motto under this bear is older than the bear by nineteen centuries: "A Mother's Love Bears All Things" rewrites Saint Paul — "Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things" (1 Corinthians 13:7) — into the pun the whole series runs on. Bears. Priscilla Hillman had the nerve to put the Apostle's hymn to love on the bottom of a teddy bear, and it is still why this one sells as a mother's gift thirty years later.

Turn her over and you're looking at Cherished Teddies before it grew up. The plate reads only "A Mother's Love Bears All Things," Reg. # 6P39/236, © 1993 P.H., 624861, China — no bear's name, initials instead of a signature, just "China" for the origin. Every later piece carries the full set. Those three absences are the fastest way to spot the earliest work: the series began in 1992, and the moulds and face painting of these first years were the best it ever got. (The catalogue name, for the record, is Mother; the early plates left it off.)

She was retired in 1995 — three years on the shelves, at a US$50 list price, from the Cherished Family Series that collectors assemble household by household. She sits in a mint ruffled dress with a coral bow, a fine gilt chain at her neck — jewellery being a detail the early pieces could still afford — under a wide coral sun hat with a dotted ribbon down the back, matched to the patch on her skirt.

For a mother's gift with something behind it, an early-mark collector, or the Cherished Family shelf missing its mother.