Vintage Precious Moments I M ME Girl with Laptop Figurine – Sam Butcher Signed Bisque Porcelain, Teardrop Eyes, Enesco Collectible, 2005

A girl sits cross-legged with an open laptop balanced across her knees, one hand resting on the keys. She has the wide teardrop eyes and cream-blonde hair of the Precious Moments children, a pink polka-dot top, and a small flower clipped above one ear. On the screen, lettered in bright green, are the words I M ME.

Sam Butcher's children began on greeting cards in the early 1970s, and the subjects that carried them into porcelain were prayers, weddings and Bible verses. The line grew alongside the families who collected it, and by 2005 its scenes had come to include the ordinary furniture of a modern childhood — school buses, ball games, and here a laptop with a small declaration typed across the screen. The eyes and the soft bisque stayed exactly as they had always been.

The finish is unglazed bisque, chalk-soft to the touch, and the colour is sprayed on so lightly that the pink of her top is little more than a tint. Against that quietness the green of the screen reads as the one saturated note on the piece, and the eye settles there first. Along the lower back of her skirt, SamB is pressed into the clay — the signature was cut into the original sculpt and carried into every casting taken from it.

The base is marked © 2005 PMI · 4004372, with the two open vent holes usual to bisque casting. She has come through the years in lovely order, her hair, the edges of the laptop and the lettering all intact. A cheerful thing to keep in view, and a kind one to give — to a graduate, to someone starting out, or to anyone who would like that sentence on a shelf.