The big adventure

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 2002

Sculptor: Joan Coderch

Size (cm): 43*135

Limited Series

Porcelain Story

This train is one of the real masterpieces of porcelain art presented in our collection. The work is unusual not only for its unique size, which makes it one of the largest pieces in the history of porcelain. It features many absolutely real details that recreate the atmosphere of preparation for the start of a long and exciting journey.

Pay attention to the number of characters in this story, to the finest details of their clothes, corresponding to the historical period from which the authors extracted and recorded so almost photographically a picture of the platform bustle preceding the whistle of the station attendant, ready to give the final signal for departure. And if you look closely at the interior of the cars, you can even see bouquets of flowers on miniature tables, and neat lamps on the walls...

It is difficult for today's youth to even imagine what the trains looked like in the past, driven by boilers, into which the train driver and his assistants had to constantly throw coal from the car following the locomotive. Well, except that those who watched the recently released movie "Murder on the Orient Express" in cinemas will understand what it is about. The train, in whose interiors the events of the detective story take place, is similar to the smallest detail to the porcelain masterpiece presented to your attention.

Personally, this work is also dear to me and brings memories of distant childhood and youth. It was on such a train that I first went on a multi-day trip from Khabarovsk to Moscow. I was four years old when my father took me and my older sister (I was the youngest, seventh child in the family) on a trip with our paralyzed mother to the capital of the country in the hope of finding a medical solution to an irreparable family problem. But Moscow doctors were unanimous in their assessments: there are no hopes any more. And, unfortunately, they were right - two years later, my mother died ...

Can you imagine what a 7-9-day trip (depending on downtime at the stations) in a second-class train car across the entire vast country is like? With the eternal search for water and food, with the eternal screams of drunken passengers and the crying of small children, with jumping onto the platform at short stops and the fear of falling behind the train ... With the lingering whistles of the locomotive and sparks bright in the night darkness flying right into the open windows of the cars... With constantly changing landscapes of unique places flying past the window, including the boundless Lake Baikal, along almost the very shore of which the railway ran then...

Four times in my time I had to overcome this path, almost eight thousand kilometers long, in the common carriage of such a train. It's impossible to forget something like this.