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NAO Herons: A Case Study
in Comparing Models and Marks

Well, these cobalt blue NAO marks keep surfacing, and the copies on which they're found are good enough to fool a non-expert. As I noted, counterfeiters generally prefer to leverage their risk by developing "fantasy models" that were never actually catalogued. In this way, the copies, which are nearly always inferior in demonstrable ways to the product they try to mirror, can't be compared with legitimate originals. Thanks to an alert collector, I'm able to offer on this page a side-by-side comparison of a genuine NAO model, one of its oldest and most popular, and a model made to look like it but which, for reasons I'll lay out here, I believe to be a fake.

First, it must be conceded that, if I'm right, this is a pretty good fake as fakes go. Counterfeiters like animal and bird models, not only becaus they're popular with consumers and thus help to leverage a counterfeiter's risk, but also because the very distinctive form of a Lladró model of a human face makes the human models a special challenge to duplicate successfully.

Nevertheless, there are subtle differences in the two versions of the model. First, note that the legs and feet on the birds are disproportionately thick in the questionable model (above right) and that they extend beyond the birds' tails in a manner they do not in the genuine article at left. (We leave aside here the matter of whether the flying birds' legs should extend beyond the tail. One of the ironies here is that, in the questionable model, the position of the feet vis-a-vis the tail is probably more faithful to the anatomy of a flying heron!)

A close-up view of the heads on the questionable model.
It's an improbable connection for birds in flight!

The treatment of the heads is less succecssful. Note that the heads are parallel in the genuine model and that they actually touch - or "collide!" - in an ultimately unsuccessul effort to duplicate the original. This decision may have been dictated by the technical difficulties in getting those long necks and heads to suspend in space as they do in the original. Lladró artisans are noted not only for their aesthetic but for their technical mastery - their ability to get long arms, legs, necks, and wings to occupy space as if they were suspended in it - or as if the air itself were holding them up. It's one of the telltale problems for counterfeiters, who generally don't have the technical expertise to be able to pull that off.

Given these other issues, the mark itself (pictured at left) is called into greater question. In the first place, the color's wrong. So much is made of the "Lladró blue backstamp" in collector discussion that some counterfeiters may not realize that the backstamp color for NAO is actually a dark brown, not blue. (See the page on genuine NAO marks.)

I'm not bothered by the "dangling mark," (a term I use in my book Collecting Lladró to describe a backstamp in which the paint chip doesn't completely unfurl). What does bother me is the color and the poor definition of the NAO lettering. Though the pseudo-Greek stylization is faithful to the genuine mark, note the truncated left leg on the "N." I could be wrong; a wise observer doesn't ever say "never" when it comes to Lladró. But, the other things considered, this mark provides additional evidence that the questionable herons model is a counterfeit.

(Finding More Info on Retired NAO)