Antique DOLL Collector March 2009 Vol. 12, No. 2
March 2009 Vol. 12, No. 2 $595 / $695 Canada www.antiquedollcollector.com
SCHOENHUT DOLLS American Ingenuity and Invention
A pretty little series 300 (wigged girl) with a hungry goose.
by Maureen Herrod All dolls in this article are in the collection of Sherryl Shirran unless otherwise noted.
lbert Schoenhut started his Philadelphia company in order to make a more durable toy piano. The year was 1872. By the time the company closed in the 1930’s, it had manufactured over 40 toy piano styles as well as hundreds of different toy and doll designs, an amazing diversity of quality, long lasting wooden playthings. One of the company’s most popular sellers was the Humpty Dumpty Circus. In 1902 Fritz Meinicke sold Albert Schoenhut a patent he had taken out on a toy animal. Soon after the transaction, Schoenhut introduced the Circus – the earliest pieces were a clown, elephant, donkey, ladder and chair. Its popularity spurred many additional animals, circus performers and accessories. Toys were sold separately and were also available in a variety of sets. In April of 1909, Teddy Roosevelt set sail for Africa on a commission from the Smithsonian Institution. By July of 1909, Albert had applied for a patent for a figure that had springjointed knees, allowing Teddy to sit on a horse. “Teddy’s Adventures in Africa,” with Teddy as its main character, sold well, but was discontinued in 1914. The animals in the safari set continued to be sold as part of the Humpty Dumpty Circus. The patent for the spring jointed figure led to the next brilliant item to hit the market. By May of 1911, Schoenhut was distributing his sixteen-inch, spring jointed, all wooden doll.
The early “infant” Tootsie Wootsie with his favorite wooden bulldog.
The Chinese babies were modeled on the Harry Schoenhut infant design of 1913 and very likely were a special order.
This boy, only produced for six months and discontinued in late 1911, is extremely rare and hard to find.
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An early series 300 doll posed with a “member of the Quacky Doodle family.
Adorable Schnickel-Fritz with an elusive and desirable bulldog.
Pretty child with two Schoenhut rabbits. She is the mold #309 and had pronounced buck teeth.
A series 300 doll from the classical period (to 1916).
One of the very first of the early carved hair girls of the 100 series.
This boy is from the 400 series. Fewer boy dolls were made and thus are more difficult to find today.
Because of this doll’s hairdo, she is considered a mold #303. She was made until 1916 and was apparently a good seller.
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Julia -
Tracing A Steiner’s Past
Julia’s original blue smocked coat with pleated ribbon at neck has a matching muff. Complementing the outfit are the original crocheted mittens and tam and cotton socks with ribbon at top.
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ave you ever wondered about the life your doll led before coming to live with you? The “jewels” of my collection all have a personal history known to me. Some have revealed their stories easily through their original owners. Others I have had to go digging to find. Take for instance my 16-inch early pressed bisque by Jules Nicholas Steiner. She is all original and unmarked. Framed by a skin wig, her very pale complexion actually glows in the candlelight. She has two sets of original clothing, but somewhere back in time she lost her earrings and one pair of stockings. Julia, whose name was faintly written on the bottom of one shoe, came to live with us in 1965, the year of our town’ s bicentennial. I was a young mother with a month old son and a two-and-a-half year old daughter
by Roberta Gallison Cunningham
Julia’s original maroon outfit is of fine wool in Mother Hubbard style tightly gathered at yoke with lace at neck and cuffs. The back closing has three hooks with loops of thread. The matching bonnet is hand stitched as is much of the dress. Her tippet and muff are made of white wool flannel with black yarn “ermine tails”. The white leather gloves are nicely stitched and have a brass, cone-shaped button closing.
the day a tall, stately stranger appeared at our front door. She introduced herself as Frances Dwight Buell, and I recognized the name of the elderly woman who owned the beautiful Georgian house two miles away. She was the widow of Raymond Leslie Buell, longtime president of the Foreign Policy Association, and editor of Fortune’s Round Tables. It was at their nearby home that plans were first discussed with Wendell Wilkie for his presidential run. The words “proper Bostonian” come to mind when I think of Mrs. Buell. Her carriage and manner were those of good breeding. As this imposing person sat down in our living room, our daughter promptly hopped onto her lap. “The child is perfectly all right,” she said as I admonished my offspring. For a full twenty minutes my little one sat quietly on the lap I felt had not held a child in a long time.
15-1/2”, pale pressed bisque head with deep rose cheeks, threaded blue paperweight eyes which have darker blue around iris. Brows are single stroked overlaid with a single stroke lighter brown from left to right. She has pierced ears, an open mouth with “fish” teeth, and original skin wig.
Getting down to the purpose of her visit, Mrs. Buell said she understood I collected antique dolls. Well, three hardly constituted a collection, but it was a start. She asked if I would be willing to arrange an exhibit of antique toys to be displayed at one of the houses that would be open during our bicentennial celebration. I agreed, and enjoyed my first experience of that kind. The exhibit over, I returned the two family dolls Mrs. Buell had loaned; a mechanical and a Steiner, “I want you to have them”, she told me. “Oh, I couldn’t”, I replied. In a voice with which one did not argue she said, “You are to keep them! There is no one in my family who would appreciate them.” I would come to understand that she was seeking a safe haven for her own “jewels”. I whispered a breathless thank you, and kissed her cheek. Wide-eyed and excited, I took “Julia” and “Frances” to their new home. My collection was nearly doubled! In the years that followed Mrs. Buell and I corresponded during her winter stays near Boston. She would send me clippings about dolls and exhibits and suggest community activities in which I might become involved. The reasons behind the latter I would understand much later. Recalling the cuddly dolls of her girlhood, in one letter she lamented the advent of Barbie. She felt that little girls needed to mother their dolls, a sentiment with which I was in full agreement. Our daughter’s Barbies were provided by my mother. It was during this time that I thought to ask her the history of the dolls she had given me. They had belonged to her mother’s cousin, Julia Howard Bush, she wrote, and had been given to her as a child by Julia herself. She went on to say that Julia’ s mother had died shortly after Julia was born in Troy, New York. Never marrying, she grew up to have a life-long interest in social causes. Through the years I imagined this motherless little girl playing with her dolls which must have come from Europe by ship. Did they travel up the Hudson River by boat or train? Did her father bring them back from a European trip or were they purchased locally or perhaps in New York City? The years passed; we moved away, but always there was the thought that some day I wanted to learn more
Julia’s original white cotton dress has white-on-white eyelet and diagonal tucking.
about the real Julia. On a visit home in 1993, I decided it was time. What I anticipated being a library research project turned into an eventful day. After making the trip to Troy, my first stop was the public library. The woman at the reference desk brought me a small file about Miss Bush. There, in a memorial written by her friends, I found most of the historical data I sought. Julia Howard Bush had been born September 17, 1872, in Troy, New York, the only child of Walter R. and Julia (Howard) Bush. Both her father and paternal grandfather had built railroad cars in Troy. Her maternal grandfather, James Leland Howard, manufactured railroad car furnishings in Hartford, Connecticut, where he was also a co-founder of Travelers Insurance and a lieutenant governor. She was a graduate of Emma Willard when it was Troy Female Seminary and had “finished” at Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut. She died in Troy on February 11, 1962. The memorial, however, provided more than statistics. What emerged was the picture of a woman who had spent her adult life quietly going about helping others. She was an only child with no children of her own, and her hometown became her family. She sought no recognition and few knew the name of their benefactress. Many individuals and organizations contributed their recollections to the memorial, telling of a much loved and respected lady. Perhaps the words of one woman sum them up well: “I shall never forget her. I was a young girl, not quite thirteen, when I first saw her. I thought she looked like a queen … She bought me my first real winter
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Fondly Gaultier by Samy Odin
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1. Block letter FG bébé with all-wooden body, around 1880 (photo by Jean Dalmard, author’s collection). 2. Antique photo shows a child from the 1880s with her FG headed doll.
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ur passion for Gaultier bébés is strong and persistent. My father and I bought our first bébé by Gaultier early in the 1980s after drooling over the photos of some gorgeous FGs seen, here and there, in books and calendars (photo 1). When this first bébé arrived in our collection, we were in awe and we felt we would never get enough dolls from this company to satisfy our growing appetite. We kept on buying, keeping and selling bébés with a Gaultier head ever since and, still today, if we are asked to provide an example of a sweet appealing 19th century doll face, Gaultier is the first we refer to. Certainly, sweetness and classicism are the ingredients that make these dolls so perfectly fitting into the beauty ideal of the Victorian age (photo 2). However, some collectors dislike this “Gaultier look”. Once, a dealer responded to my inquiry if she had FG bébés for sale: “I never carry FG’s, they all look the same, so why should I bother?” Let’s recall the reasons why I do bother with bébés by this talented French porcelain maker, as perhaps I’m not the only “Gaultier addict” left on this planet! The founder of the Gautier firm, the venerable François, was in an excellent position, running his successful porcelain factory, to capitalize on the growing popularity of the “bébé” during the late 1870s. He was already providing lady doll heads to all of the major doll companies active in Paris at that time. No wonder that he quickly offered a new doll head that would explicitly represent a child instead of an adult. The success of this new concept was almost immediate and François Gaultier was already there to make it even greater. The earliest FG models were assembled with a leather body having a bisque shoulder-plate and lower arms. I remember attending the UFDC national convention in Denver in 2002, where Gail Cook generously shared two dolls from her private collection: a spectacular AT in size 10 and an almost as good block letter FG in the same size (see ADC volume 5 number 9, page 47). Gail’s erudite purpose, in putting both of these dolls in competition at the same time, was to demonstrate how these two dolls shared exactly the same type of body, the same pattern for the leather parts, even the same hands and breast-plate for the bisque. The only difference was in the mold used for the heads. It seems evident that François Gaultier made the bisque parts of both these dolls. In fact, according to
the Gaultier 1881 inventory, André Thuillier was already mentioned among the various doll makers who were in business with this porcelain factory. Looking at the way both the heads of these dolls are marked, it clearly appears that the characters of the letters and size numbers, as well as the position of the marking at the back of the head near to the crown rim, reveal this same provenance. André Thuillier had probably started his own doll business using heads made by Letu & Mauger, his former employers, but by the time he started making his first bébés, he had stopped using the Letu & Mauger lady doll heads and was buying all of his bisque supplies from François Gaultier. It is my conviction that André Thuillier started his bébé production using heads provided by Gaultier with a standard FG mold and marking before 1880, when he first mentions the bébés in his advertisements. After this new product apparently did well, I speculate that André Thuillier had his own mold and marking developed by Gaultier, around 1881-1882. Some of the earliest FG bébés with a kid body have a physiognomy that is evidently earlier than the one seen on the first kid-bodied AT marked bébés. If it is very likely that Thuillier assembled them, it is difficult to determine how soon he exploited this new product. André Thuillier was, at that time, in direct competition with Léon Casimir Bru, who had been the first French doll maker to come out on the market with a leather-bodied bébé in 1879. Did Thuillier start making his first bébés that very same year? It is plausible that he had already tested this new product before he advertised it in 1880. So, it is my conviction that ALL of the kid-bodied FG bébés that come with those typical outside-bended fingers, are, in fact, the earliest bébés assembled by André Thuillier between 1879 and 1881 (photo 3). Other early FG bébé heads marked with the so-called “block letters” usually come with two different types of body: a rarer all-wooden fully articulated one and a regular wooden and compo version with straight wrists. Their make-up is typical of the early bébés from the late 1870s to the early 1880s. Pale pressed bisque, regular arched single-stroked eyebrows, luminous enamel eyes with radiant decoration, closed mouth with outlined shaded lips, usually of vary pale tone, and delicate cheeks blush (photos 1 and 4). Both of these early bébés are presently on display in the Musée de la Poupée in Paris. The deluxe models with an eight loose ball-jointed body, entirely made of wood, are still an enigma for me. Dolls with similar bodies have been listed with Jumeau heads (see François Theimer/Florence, Theriault, The Jumeau Book, pp. 263 and 291), Bru heads (see Midred Seeley, Fabulous French Bébés, pp. 150 and 162) and even Huret (see Florence Theriault, A Whispering of Dolls, pp. 6 and 7) or Thuillier heads (see Florence Theriault, The Happy Life of a Collector, p. 97). Did all of these dolls originally start out life with this type of body? If yes, is it possible that different doll makers made doll bodies at that point that were identical one to another? Or was there an unidentified doll maker who was providing these all-wooden bodies to various companies, who ordered them for their more luxurious products? In this case, which of these doll
4. Very pale early block letter bébé by Gaultier in size 7 (photo by Jean Dalmard, author’s collection). 3. Earliest FG bébé with leather body attributed to Thuillier (photo by Guido Odin, former Madame Petyt collection).
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