Kitakami-cruise

Country: Spain

Manufactory: Lladro

Date of establishment: 1989

Sculptor: Salvador Debon

Size (cm): 32.5*105

Limited Series

Porcelain Story

I bought this very rare and incredibly beautiful porcelain composition...twice. Seeing it for the first time at an American online auction, I was so fired up with the desire to become its owner that all 20 days of the auction I was stuck at the computer for a long time, afraid to miss a rare opportunity. As it turned out, not in vain. The won lot only needed to be paid - and patiently wait for the delivery. I won't keep the intrigue for long. I - in accordance with all strict rules - paid for the purchase, but I did not become the owner of the long-awaited boat ...!

It was at the very beginning of my collecting activity. And much of the world of not always decent deeds associated with this business, I still had to learn. As a rule, understanding is best learned through personal mistakes.

A few years later, when I saw the same boat on the internet (by the way, in decades I met it for the second and, as it turned out, the last time), I was already more careful. And we got it all...

When a package arrived from New Zealand (as the previous owner of this beauty was located there), we were shocked when we saw it. If you roughly understand what a sarcophagus looks like, then this work was sent to us in a sarcophagus. A multi-layer wooden structure weighing about 80 kilograms turned out to be the most correct form of packaging for such a large one - more than a meter in length! - and a fragile porcelain composition, which includes a lot of small parts of the boat and a large group of heroes of an old plot. Surprisingly, as a result of such proper packaging, not a single part was damaged! Well, except that a thick layer of dust stuck together at work indicated that the storage conditions were very strange. For almost two weeks, my wife, together with her eldest (then still five or six years old) son, with the help of toothbrushes (!) brought the long-awaited package to perfect shine ... Little Dimochka was doubly interested in doing this work, because he understood that the boat had arrived from the country that he had, by that time, managed to visit. But this is a topic for a completely different story.