Vintage Lladro Shepherdess with Dove Figurine 4660 – Reclining Girl in Hood, Bird on Branch, Handmade Porcelain Spain, 1980s

A shepherdess in a hood lies back in the grass and reaches toward a dove on a bare branch. This is Lladró #4660, "Shepherdess with Dove" — modelled by Vicente Martinez, made from 1970 until it was retired in 1994, so no longer produced. About six and a half inches, in the soft blue-grey and white that makes a Lladró recognisable across a room.

That colour is the thing worth understanding. On a Lladró the tones aren't painted on top — they are fused into the glaze in a single high-temperature firing, so the blues and greys melt into one another with no hard edges and a quiet sheen. It is the hardest thing to fake, and the reason these figures glow the way they do. The elongated neck and pose are the house style the three Lladró brothers set outside Valencia in the 1950s; the little pointed slippers peeking from under her skirt are the sort of human detail the studio always kept.

The base carries the blue bellflower mark and Lladró · Hand Made in Spain — the printed mark the factory adopted in the late 1970s, which places this example in the 1980s even though the model itself dates to 1970.

The dove, the branch and the fingertips — the fragile parts that usually go first — are all intact here.