Royal Doulton Figurine Dressing Up HN2964

Dressing Up (HN2964) was designed by Pauline Parsons and issued by Royal Doulton from 1982 to 1985, standing 7.5 inches tall as part of the Childhood Days series. The subject is a small girl playing dress-up in her mother's clothes — the oversized dress, heels, hat and handbag all in tow — a moment of childhood imagination so universally recognisable that it needs no explanation.

Parsons had a particular gift for the Childhood Days series, capturing the specific energy and unconscious comedy of children in ways that feel observed rather than staged. Dressing Up is among her most successful subjects in the range — the scale of the clothes against the child, the earnestness of the performance, and the delightful wrongness of adult things on small people all rendered with genuine affection and a light touch.

The production window ran just three years before retirement in 1985, placing Dressing Up among the shorter-run Childhood Days figures. Parsons' child studies from this period have maintained consistent collector interest, and clean examples of the three-year pieces are noticeably harder to find than their relatively recent dates might suggest.