Vintage Royal Doulton Clarissa HN 2345 Figurine – Sage Green Ball Gown, Pink Puff Sleeves, Margaret Davies, Original Tag, England 1970s

A Royal Doulton porcelain figurine — Clarissa, HN 2345 — a young woman in an eighteenth-century ball gown standing with a small bouquet held in front of her, head tilted slightly down. The dress is sage / mineral green, full-skirted in the court silhouette of the period, with pink puff sleeves cut off the shoulder and a small pink ribbon bow at the bodice. A chestnut-blonde chignon at the back of the head finishes with another pink ribbon. The bouquet she carries is yellow at the centre, blue around the edges, with two pink buds and a sprig of green leaves tucked in.

Sit with the skirt and the modelling shows itself. The folds are not stamped repeats — the sculptor has laid down twelve or so individual pleats that fall asymmetrically, the heavier curve pulling toward the right hip where the figure's weight rests, the lighter folds catching at the back where the cloth lifts. The hand-tinted shading runs darker into the under-folds and lifts to pale green along the outer crests, the kind of patient three-pass tinting that turns ceramic green into the appearance of silk green. On the sleeves the painter has used a slightly higher-saturation pink at the puff's crest, so the volume reads as catching light rather than sitting flat. The bouquet at the centre is the painter's quiet moment — each blossom modelled in three colour tones, the yellow at the centre warmed slightly into orange, the blue softened toward periwinkle at the edges, none of it dabbed or rushed.

The base reads in green script: Royal Doulton crown-lion stamp + Made in England / Royal Doulton Bone China in the rim, then Clarissa / HN 2345 / COPR 1967 / Doulton & Co Limited / Rd No 931276 / Rd No 51180 / Rd No 11081 / Rd No 382/67. The 1967 copyright is the original mould date; the model was issued in 1968 and withdrawn in 1981, a thirteen-year production run that is notably shorter than the more familiar Doulton Pretty Ladies (typically twenty to thirty years of production) — meaning Clarissa turns up less often on the secondary market than her catalogue-mates. The original Royal Doulton hang tag — the small red-and-white round paper tag tied to the figure's wrist with a thin gold cord — is still attached, which collectors take as a useful tell of careful storage history (most of these tags fall off within the first year of cabinet display).

Clarissa sits in Margaret Davies's Pretty Ladies vocabulary — Davies designed roughly a hundred Pretty Ladies figures across 1957–1981, most in standing eighteenth-century-style poses with the sculpting interest in the skirt and the cloth rather than action. The sage-and-pink palette here is one of her recurring choices (the same combination appears in Fragrance HN 2334, another of her sage-dress designs from the same period).

A figurine for the HN-series Doulton collector with a Pretty Ladies focus, for the Margaret Davies specialist building the shorter-run figures, for the eighteenth-century / Regency / Jane Austen aesthetic display, for the vanity table or curio cabinet, or as a serious milestone gift — wedding, retirement, important anniversary.