Vintage Miquel Requena Lucia Porcelain Figurine – Girl with Dove, Lladro Style Valencia Spain, Blue-Grey Glaze Nightgown, Handmade 1980s

A long-haired girl in a floor-length gown, head bowed, one hand raised to hold a dove — modelled in the soft blue-grey and white you know from Valencian porcelain, glossy and elongated. She is marked Lucia underneath, and if she looks like a Lladró, there's a reason, though she isn't one.

The base reads Porcelanas Miquel Requena · Cuart de Poblet · Valencia · Made in Spain. Requena is one of the workshops that grew up around Lladró in the porcelain cluster west of Valencia — same vocabulary of hand-built figures and colours melted into the glaze in a single firing, a different house and a gentler price. Saying so plainly is the honest thing: the pedigree is genuine Valencian porcelain, just not the Lladró name. Requena also printed the model's name, Lucia, on the foot, which is a help when you go looking for her.

The making shows in the small places. Her face is the only painted thing on her — brows, lashes and mouth put in with a brush so fine the strokes are barely a hair wide, against a blush that fades out with no edge at all. Everywhere else the colour is in the glaze: the grey-blue of her hair and hem drifts into the white without a line anywhere, the way it does when the pigment is fired into the coat rather than laid on top. The gown was thrown and folded by hand — run a finger down the back and you can feel where the clay was pinched into the long vertical pleat. The dove was made separately and joined at her palm, the join smoothed over and glazed until it disappeared, which is exactly why the bird and the fingertips are the first things to go on a figure like this. Both are whole here.

For a lover of Lladró-style Spanish porcelain, a collector of Requena, or anyone charmed by a girl and her dove.