Vintage Lladro Shepherdess with Dog Figurine 1034 – Retired Julio Fernandez, Girl Carrying Basket of Bread, Handmade Porcelain Spain, 1980s

A girl in a head-scarf and white apron carries a basket of bread on her arm, a small dog looking up at her feet. This is Lladró #1034, "Shepherdess with Dog" — modelled by Julio Fernández, made from 1969 until it was retired in 1989. About eleven inches, in the soft grey-blue and white that reads as a Lladró across a room.

The base carries the genuine blue bellflower mark, Lladró · Hand Made in Spain. Kerchiefed country girls like this — carrying bread, herding geese, cradling ducks — were the warm heart of what Lladró made, produced for decades, which means the value isn't in rarity: it's in the piece being genuine and whole.

The making is the familiar Lladró magic — colours fused into the glaze in a single high firing, no hard edges, the elongated pose, the little slipper under the hem. The basket and its bread, the dog and the fingertips are the delicate, projecting parts that usually go first, and here they are all intact. This is the glossy version (the model was also made in matte).

For a Lladró collector, a lover of pastoral figures, or anyone charmed by a girl and her little dog.