Vintage Goebel M.I. Hummel Annual Christmas Plate – Bas-Relief Angel with Lantern & Star Staff, Pink Border, Hum 692, Germany, 1996

The angel is nearly a figurine. On the mid-1990s Christmas plates Goebel worked in bas-relief rather than flat print — the master sculptor Helmut Fischer raised the figure off the surface so the face, the lantern and the little hand stand proud of the plate, almost as if a Hummel figure had settled onto it. This one is a red-robed angel scattered with stars, a lantern in one hand and a star-tipped staff in the other, wings behind, mouth open mid-carol. A pink border rings it with embossed stars and the year, 1996.

That year is doubly fixed: the base carries Goebel's 125th-anniversary mark, and the firm was founded in 1871 — so the little "125" says 1996 all on its own.

The child is the work of a real person with a short, sad story. M.I. Hummel was Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel, a Franciscan nun and trained artist whose drawings of round-faced German children Goebel licensed in 1935. She died of tuberculosis in 1946, aged 37, in a convent requisitioned during the war, and never saw how far her little figures would travel. Goebel has paid royalties to her convent for ninety years. Every Hummel carries that behind it.

Marked on the back Weihnachtsteller · M.I. Hummel · Annual Christmas Plate · Hum 692 · Rödental, Germany, with its original ribbon for hanging.