Cavalier and lady with umbrella

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 1970

Sculptor: Fulgencio García

Height (cm): 50

Porcelain Story

The spirit of small towns... How painfully sweet and pleasant it is! With its slowness, respectfulness, established traditions and habits. The special spirit of small towns. Small, first of all, not so much in terms of the area they occupy, but in terms of long-established comfort and order. Speaking of this, I seem to see small Spanish, German, Italian, Belgian, French, Slovenian, Czech, Dutch, and, of course, old English towns in front of me.

Mostly English, because the work presented today to your attention was first seen by me in a place that sometimes I want to dream about. Time seemed to stop there. The people there, as if by chance, remained the same, the same people of a hundred years ago, preserved as if on purpose to make it easier for us to imagine how everything was here many years ago. I am talking now about a very old English city of Chester. It is connected with big and noisy Manchester only by consonance in the name. Chester, where we went on excursions, literally fascinated with sophistication, stiffness and, at the same time, amazing goodwill. We were in Chester around Christmas time. And there it begins just a few months before the start of the holidays. The narrow streets and small cozy squares flooded with warm November sun were already almost completely decorated with New Year's compositions and garlands. There was a strong alluring smell of freshly brewed mulled wine in the air...

It was not a performance for tourists, but it seemed to me that here and there we came across such old couples of gentlemen and their middle-aged, but very well-groomed ladies with umbrellas not for the weather and tiny squealing dogs. Colleagues dispersed to shops and pubs, and I could not take my eyes off this rather old Spanish work, exhibited in a narrow window of a porcelain shop. I knew that I could not buy it. Because the large (half a meter!) size of the work involved another torment with the search for packaging material, checking in luggage and acute feelings: it will break - it will not break ... Yes, and time was already running out.

A few years later I came across this work on one of the American sites. This was the same couple from the English past, created by the hands of Spanish masters from the present. Now it is in our collection and every time it pleases me with memories of the glorious city of Chester, where time seems to have started back.