El Portal Porcelana

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Nadal Porcelain

-Peggy Whiteneck

Little is known about Nadal outside Europe, but although it has only a fraction of the market that has been generated by the more ambitious Lladró company, collectors who encounter Nadal on the secondary market are intrigued by it and impressed with its obvious quality. And, thanks to alert Lladró collector Jorge L. Gonzalez, we now know that Nadal Porcelain does, indeed, have a web site! (Click here for Nadal.)

(7/24/06 update: As of today, the link posted above is new. The English- language web site for Nadal, formerly based in the UK, appears to have been taken down. The company web site is now entirely in Spanish, and the database of their products has been password-protected. Since this company is even more tight-lipped than Lladró, it's impossible to say exactly what all this means, though it would seem to indicate a further retrenchment from international operations and, perhaps, a concentration exclusively on domestic sales within Spain. The lack of company responsiveness to questions from English-speaking collectors - a topic of frequent complaint to me as well as being based on my personal experience - enormously complicates efforts to collect it and to identify individual models. Please, then, don't ask me for assistance with model identifications, as everything I know about this brand is on this web page!)

Founded in 1915, the Nadal Porcelain company is probably the oldest extant contemporary fine porcelain manufacturer in the Valencian region of Spain. It was formerly noted for its unusual mixture of matte and gloss surfaces within the same model. Today, its standard finish is either a gloss or something very much akin to Gres in the Lladró line.

I don't find the range of themes treated in the Nadal corpus to be as large as that in Lladró. Nadal has had a strong interest in Egyptian motifs and has done a number of Gres figurines and busts on Egyptian themes.

I'm constantly getting emails from collectors wanting identifications of and information about their Nadal figurines, sometimes complaining that the company is not responsive to their questions. Sorry, but I, too, have found this company a difficult nut to crack. If anyone out there in cypersace has one or more old retail catalogs for Nadal that they'd be willing to copy and send to me, I could do a Nadal web catalog here on "El Portal Porcelana." Please email me if you could help with that info. In the interim, a picture catalog of all their current issues can be found on their own web site (click on the company link above.) Sorry...I'd help if I could, but that's the best I can do for now. So please don't email me asking for particular Nadal figurine IDs. :o)

Nadal's "Offering to Osiris" is a limited edition of 5000 that expresses Nadal's aesthetic interest in Egyptian themes. It currently retails at $575.

Nadal doesn't appear to have a strong export presence outside Spain and the UK. The lack of global market penetration would go some way to explain why these very expensive-to-make figurines seem to go for next to nothing on eBay - making them a great collecting opportunity for those who want something beautiful and don't care a great deal about resale, at least in the short to mid-term. (I am not prescient enough to predict the long term prospects for Nadal secondary market values - beyond noting that one of the reasons Lladró has been so relatively successful as a secondary market phenomenon is its international retail market and the global reputation and brand recognition resulting from that presence.)

This enchanting little miss is Nadal's "Dreamy Afternoon," priced at $210.

(Please note a possible source of confusion: Nadal porcelain in Spain is not the same company as the Lladró secondary market dealership in the United states owned by a family that happens to have the same surname. [Click on the favorite links page on the left border to find a link to the web site for this Lladró dealership, "Porcelain Splendor," a respected source for secondary market Lladró and which has been in business for a long time.])