Vintage Royal Doulton Bunnykins Child's Plate – Mr Piggly's Stores Shop Scene, Running Rabbit Border, English Bone China Nursery Ware 1960s

A little grocery with Mr Piggly's Stores on the sign, a bespectacled pig in a red apron weighing out vegetables behind the counter, and a mother rabbit in a blue dress and straw hat come shopping with her children — one small bunny under a pink umbrella, another already nibbling a carrot, a sack of Piglet Carrots propped in the corner. Around the rim runs the familiar band of little brown rabbits over tufts of green grass.

This is Royal Doulton Bunnykins, and the scene carries its own title — Mr Piggly's Stores. That matters more than it sounds. Bunnykins runs to a whole cast of named nursery scenes — the Picnic, the Letterbox, Mr Piggly's shop — each with its own small story, and collectors chase them one title at a time. The band of running rabbits round the rim is the quiet signature that says Bunnykins at a glance. The drawings began in 1934 with Barbara Vernon, a nun and the daughter of Doulton's general manager, who sketched the rabbits at her convent and posted them back to the pottery; every scene reads like a page from a picture book because one was quite literally being drawn.

Underneath is the brown English Fine Bone China · Bunnykins · Regd Trade Mark stamp with its small running-rabbit device, the mark Doulton used through the 1960s–70s. (That ©1936 you often see on Bunnykins dates the series copyright; the piece itself came decades later.) It is genuine fine bone china, printed and hand-tinted. This was a plate a child ate from, and it shows: the well carries some fine surface scratching from cutlery — light, and it doesn't interrupt the picture.

For a Bunnykins collector filling in a scene, a new-baby or christening gift, or anyone who loves a storybook rabbit on the tea table.