Vintage Royal Doulton Adrienne HN 2304 Figurine – Blue Gown, Yellow Shawl, Margaret Davies Pretty Ladies, England 1970s

A Royal Doulton porcelain figurine — Adrienne, HN 2304 — a young woman standing with her hands folded in front, a beige-yellow shawl pulled across her shoulders over a sky-blue Empire-waist gown. Her hair is up in a chestnut chignon, finished with a blue ribbon bow at the crown, and her gaze sits at a slight downward angle, demure rather than direct.

Look at the way the shawl is modelled. It is not a single thrown drape — the sculptor has gathered it diagonally across the body, then twisted it once at the right hip where the figure catches it with her hand, so the fold reads as actual cloth pulled across actual shoulders rather than ceramic draped over a form. The hand-painted shading runs darker along the underside of each fold, lighter at the crest, the kind of restrained finishing that says the painter was working carefully through the colour rather than dabbing it on. The face is painted in the Doulton three-tone palette of the period — soft white ground, the pink blush along the cheekbone, the deeper rose at the lips — and the eye is given a single hand-painted iris rather than a transfer dot.

The base reads in full: the green Royal Doulton crown-lion stamp at the top with Made in England / Royal Doulton around the rim, then Adrienne / Copr 1963 / Doulton & Co Limited 1647 / Rd No 9954 / Rd No 442/63 below. A hand-inked painter's number sits to the side, written in blue by whoever finished the piece. The 1963 date is the copyright on the original mould — the model was issued in 1964 and stayed in production through 1991, so this example sits somewhere across that twenty-seven-year window with no datestamp to narrow it further. Adrienne is one of Margaret Davies' Pretty Ladies figures; her work, in this period, leans toward standing figures in formal eighteenth-century-inspired dress, where the sculpting interest is in the cloth and the demure gaze rather than action.

A figurine for the HN-series collector, for the Margaret Davies-Pretty Ladies specialist, for the eighteenth-century costume / regency-aesthetic display, for a vanity table or curio cabinet, or as a Mother's Day / vintage gift to someone who liked the figure-collecting era of the 1970s–80s.