Glad to Help

This authentic antique baby doll will be traveling to the United Federation Of Doll Clubs (UFDC) 77th annual convention in New Orleans to be a "helper." This donation by our club will be used to raise funds for UFDC. At the convention, the helpers are put on display and attendees buy raffle tickets and place the tickets in a box in front of the items they hope to win. 

The doll is Marked "Century Doll Co. Kestner Germany." It was produced by the renown doll firm of J.D. Kestner for the Century Doll Company, founded in 1909 in New York by by Max Scheuer. The company continued in business until 1928, when it was merged with the Domec Toy Company. This adorable infant has the cutest character face with sleeping blue glass eyes and full coral lips. The head is of rosy smooth bisque, with pudgy composition hands and a cloth body. Dressed in vintage clothing, this darling doll is 16 inches long.

 

November 12, 2023, Meeting

Member Sharon Weintraub did a program on Black all-bisque dolls. She explained the French and German companies, and later Japanese makers, created Black all-bisque dolls, although in far smaller numbers than white dolls. While sometimes a Black all-bisque doll was made in same mold as a white doll and simply tinted brown, companies also created these dolls with ethnic features. In most cases the dolls were not made expressly for Black children. Many were garbed in ethnic costumes representing French or German colonies or were dressed as servants or entertainers. This example by Simon and Halbig is incised 836 and is a standard mold tinted with a brown complexion. She has bare feet and wears her original bathing costume. The diminutive doll she holds is a French doll known as a Liliputien. Just 2.75 inches high, she  has a swivel neck with a molded loop and has peg-jointed arms and legs. These Les Liliputiens came in a wide variety of costumes; although the white versions generally wore painted light blue boots, the Black dolls were barefoot.

Sharon next discussed the Black all-bisque dolls by the German company Gebruder Kuhnlenz. She said the these dolls have appealing ethnic features with full lips and prominent lower faces. The complexions vary from brown to deep black, the dolls do not have painted lashes, and are barefoot. This pair in their original box wear the costumes of cakewalk dancers.  Inside one of the sections in the box is written in pencil "From Grace to Sadie Newell Christmas 1889." 

Three more dolls by Kuhnlenz. The red and yellow outfit is a copy of an original costume worn by a Black Kuhnlenz doll.

Sharon displayed these examples of Black all-bisque dolls attributed to the German company J.D. Kestner.  The two girl dolls have swivel necks. The one in the red gingham dress has a closed mouth while the one in blue has an open mouth with tiny inset teeth. The standing boy in the molded rompers has loop-jointed arms. All of the dolls have bare feet.

This is a frozen version of the boy in the molded outfit. 

Sharon said that the firm of Hertwig and Company made a wide variety of Black all-bisque dolls. The tallest doll in the "grass" skirt is painted bisque. Next to her is a tiny immobile figure of a Black man in a yellow top hat; he is part of a family of miniature Black figures. Behind him are two cute character dolls in their original matching ribbon outfits. In the back row are two more examples of German Black all-bisque does by unknown German companies. The one in the molded outfit and "straw" hat is wire-jointed. The doll next to him in a molded turban wears his original Middle-Eastern outfit. 

Sharon then shared examples of French Black all-bisque dolls. The one in the red and white outfit is marked on the back of her swivel neck with the "F.G." in a scroll mark of Francois Gauthier. Her all-original outfit may represent one of France's Caribbean colonies. She was made using a typical all-bisque mignonnette doll mold and has molded boots. The two little dolls are more examples of Liliputiens  and wear their original clothing.

Sharon explained that when German goods were embargoed during WWI, Japanese companies entered the bisque doll market, often directly copying German dolls. This example of a Japanese Black all-bisque doll may be early, because the modeling and decoration are of higher quality than is typically found on these Japanese products. The doll has unusual "snow" hair created with bits of ground bisque. 

Member Bette Birdsong brought several examples of Black all-bisque dolls. This tiny bare-foot example is by Simon and Halbig.

These are more typical examples of Japanese dolls. They are often referred to as "Topsy" because of the tiny pigtails inserted into their scalps. Such dolls were often sold in five and dime stores in the United States. Copies of these dolls with extremely black shiny complexions began being produced in China in the 1980s.  

A variety of itty-bitty Black babies ride in a tiny tin car. The one in red is an all-bisque doll and the other two are seated figurines (the one in the back is eating a watermelon slice). These seated figurines are often found attached to miniature cotton bales and were sold as souvenirs throughout the South.

Member Pam Hardy shared this black cloth doll with an embroidered face. It appears to be a commercially produced doll from the 1940s.

Member Jenell Howell brought these two tiny Liliputiens.

She also shared this stunning wooden Schoenhut doll.

 

September 12, 2021, Meeting

The Austin Doll Collectors Society had its first in-person meeting in over a year, congregating at member Sharon Weintraub's home. Sharon gave a program on Asian character dolls by German and French bisque doll makers. She explained that although the spice trade between Asia and Europe dates back thousands of years, by the 16th century European merchants, often with military support, had seized control of the trade routes, gaining a foothold in the East. The Chinese Qing dynasty losses to Britain and its European allies in the First (1839-42)  and Second Opium Wars (1856-1860) forced China to grant Western companies favorable trade concessions and concede territory to their control. In 1853 American Commodore Mathew Perry sailed into Tokyo harbor, beginning the re-establishment of trade and contact with Japanese, who had closed off their country to most foreigners in 1639. By the 1870s, these trading concessions had expanded into colonial control, with Britain, France, and the Netherlands claiming territories throughout Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The explosion in magazines and newspapers helped bring images and stories of Asian nations and people to the average European. Schoolchildren learned about their countries' colonies and their peoples. Advances in printing made colorful children’s books widely available and affordable and fanciful stories and characters from the East began to appear in the pages of children’s storybooks. All of the interest in the East inspired both French and German doll companies to create dolls representing Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, and other Asian peoples. In some cases, the dolls were little more than colorful stereotypes while other manufacturers strove for more ethnically correct features and clothing. 

The cheerful Asian infant doll belongs to member Jenell Howell. He is by J.D. Kestner and is on a ball-jointed toddler body, rather than the more typical bent limb baby body. Next to him is Mold 1329 by Simon and Halbig, dressed in an antique outfit of a Manchu noblewoman, including the unusual platform shoes.  

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Another Asian baby by Kestner, this time in a diminutive all-bisque version. He wears his original, but now fragile, silk outfit. His "slippers" were created by painting the soles of his bare feet black and gluing cord around the edges.

Two more Asian characters by Simon and Halbig. The smaller doll is all-bisque and dressed in an antique embroidered kimono.  She has molded blue slippers with upturned toes.  The other doll is Mold 1129 and is all original.

These 4.5-inch high charming cherubs are Chin-Chin Baby by Gebruder Heubach. Each carries the Heubach square mark faintly incised on the soles of the feet. Made to compete with the popular Kewpie doll, the Chin-Chin Babies came in a variety of headdresses. The girl in the center has her original paper tags.

Another Chin-Chin Baby in a bright orange and blue cap next to a Queue San Baby by Morimura Brothers of Japan.  The two dolls are often confused, as the Queue San is clearly a copy of the Chin-Chin. However the Queue San Baby is larger, with rougher bisque and with less distinct modeling.

All original, this beautiful baby is by Armand Marseille. Incised on the back of the head is the name "Ellar" inside of a six-pointed star. Marseille produced heads for other factories and distributors, but just who "Ellar" is remains a mystery. 

German companies produced a variety of all-bisque Asian dolls. The little lady is the crocheted blue kimono is by Carl Horn and is just 1.75 inches high, including her yarn wig. The minute man in the red cap is by Hertwig and Company. He has a painted dropping mustache and has a little yarn queue inserted in the back of his cap.

French doll makers also produced Asian dolls.  The largest doll is a bit of a mystery. He has a French fashion style shoulder head on a fully jointed twill-covered body with bisque lower arms and lower legs with bare feet. The clothing is old and fragile.  The two tiny dolls are Lilliputiens. Just 2.5 inches tall, these all-bisque dolls were available in a wide variety of costumes, including French regional and historical dress, storybook characters, and ethnic dolls. Like all Lilliputiens, they have swivel necks with a molded loop and painted features.  The pair wear their original costumes and the man has a braided queue inserted into the back of his bald pate.

Elaine Jackson brought her 1950s Kathe Kruse doll to share.

October 13, 2018, Doll Show Special Exhibit

At our October 13, 2018, doll show, club members shared their dolls in a special exhibit that gave a brief tour of doll bodies from the 1800s through contemporary times. While it is the faces of dolls that intrigue and delight collectors, doll bodies, although often hidden under clothing, are as important an element of a doll’s history and appeal. 

Although doll heads have long been made out of papier mache, wood, bisque, and china, the bodies are generally made from another material, such as cloth or kid. Making a doll entirely out of bisque or china would have been expensive to manufacture and ship and result in a doll too heavy and fragile for a child to play with. Also, as the bodies would be covered by clothing, a less expensive body made more economic sense. For families who could not afford to buy an entire doll, shops and general stores often offered shoulder heads, with the body to be sewn at home. The larger doll features an early papier mache shoulder head by Adolph Wislizenus of Germany, circa 1865. It is on a homemade cloth body with stitched joints and separately sewn fingers. Such bodies might seem crude to our modern eyes, but no doubt this doll was beautiful to some little girl long ago, giving her a companion to cuddle and dress.

Her tiny companion is a small exception (literally) to the general rule that doll bodies were not made of bisque or china. Beginning in the 1870s, Germany and France produced small dolls entirely of bisque, often jointed at the shoulders and hips, and for the finer versions, with swivel necks. This example is by the German firm of Simon and Halbig. She, like most of the earlier and finer all-bisque dolls, is peg-strung, meaning that the elastic was pulled through a hole at the top of the arm or leg and pegged into place with a bit of wood. Later, dolls were made with molded loops, making stringing much simpler. By the 1910s, many companies like Hertwig and Company of Germany were using inexpensive and sturdy wire to string their dolls. 

Germany had a long history of producing wooden play dolls, but the seated doll is a rare example made in the United States. In 1858, Joel Ellis established a factory that manufactured a variety of toys from wood, such as doll carriages, sleds, carts, and wagons. Expanding upon his toy business, in 1873 Ellis patented a doll carved from rock maple. However, because of an economic depression, the dolls were produced for only one year. Although the head is stationary, the doll is jointed at the shoulders, elbows, hips and knees with with mortise and tenon joints and has metal hands and feet. 

The standing lovely lady is from the French firm of Jumeau and dates from the 1870s. From the 1860s through the 1880s, most dolls portrayed adult women. The French were renown for their costly fashion dolls with bisque or china heads and wasp-waisted bodies, typically of fine kid. There was an entire industry in Paris dedicated to providing these costly dolls with all the accoutrements of a fine lady of fashion. 

Kid bodies with rivets joints and bisque or composition arms were also used on the later bisque shoulder head child dolls. This example with a pristine kid body is Mold 195 by J.D. Kestner. Her face, with its large eyes, sweet bland expression, and open mouth with tiny teeth is known to collectors as the “dolly face,” a popular style produced by many German and French companies. Note this model has fur eyebrows, patented by Kestner in 1910.

In 1909, the German company of Kämmer and Reinhardt introduced Mold 100 (dubbed by early collectors as the Kaiser Baby). Not only did the bisque head realistically portray that of a infant with a toothless smile and double chin, the composition body was shaped like that of a plump baby with pudgy bent arms and legs. Other companies quickly copied this body for their own line of infants. This example of a bent-limb body is Mold 619 by the German firm of Bahr and Proschild.

German doll artist Käthe Kruse began making dolls for her daughters because she disliked the available commercially-made toys. In 1910, she displayed her dolls in a Berlin department store and they were so popular she began producing them commercially. The early dolls had muslin bodies stuffed with reindeer hair, were jointed at the hips and shoulders, and featured hand painted pressed fabric heads. The bashful boy in the back in his original underwear dates around 1912.

The seated all-wood doll was created by the American company founded by Albert Schoenhut. In 1911, the company introduced the “All-Wood Perfection Art Doll.” The dolls were jointed with a system of internal springs. They had holes in their feet and wore special shoes and socks with matching openings. The holes fit on a stand which allowed the dolls to hold almost any pose. The earliest dolls had character faces, but in order to compete with less expensive bisque and composition dolls., Schoenhut later introduced faces with more doll-like features, as well as toddler and baby dolls, and even a doll with sleeping eyes. However, by 1935 the company declared bankruptcy.

By the 1880s, child and baby dolls had pushed aside their more womanly counterparts, conquering the playroom. However, in the Edwardian period, lady dolls won a brief reprieve with the popularity of the Gibson girl. Both French and German companies produced lady dolls on womanly ball-jointed composition bodies. The elegant Edwardian in the pink silk corset is "La Patricienne" by Edmund Daspres and dates from 1905. Although her body with its narrow waist and subtle bosom was created in France, her bisque head is Mold 1159 by the German firm of Simon and Halbig.  

Beginning in the 1910s, American companies began producing dolls made entirely out of composition or with composition heads and limbs. Lightweight, sturdier, and less costly than bisque dolls, they quickly conquered the American market. Composition could not be washed and the finish could craze or crack as the underlying composition material expanded or contracted due to humidity and temperature. Composition was replaced by hard plastic after WWII. The pretty girl in pigtails is typical of many of the dolls of the era, with a composition head and limbs, but a cloth body, often with a simple mechanism that made the doll squeak “Mama” when tilted. She is unmarked. 

From 1928 through the 1940s, Joseph Kallus, the founder of Cameo Doll Company, created a series of character dolls with segmented wood bodies and composition heads. These included well-know comic characters such as Betty Boop and Popeye, Walt Disney characters such as Mickey Mouse and Jiminy Cricket, and advertising dolls. Others were simply charming children, such as this Joy, introduced in 1932.

This curvaceous beauty heralds the reintroduction of the lady doll. In 1955, Madame Alexander created Cissy, a glamorous fashion doll with a shapely female figure, feet molded for high heels, and a sophisticated wardrobe. Of hard plastic and 20 to 21 inches tall, Cissy is jointed at the neck, shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, with earlier dolls also having an upper arm joint. She was produced through 1962, with a vinyl version reintroduced in 1966.

The popularity of Cissy encouraged other companies to introduce similar fashion ladies. In 1958, Uneeda Doll Company introduced its own fashion lady doll, Dollikin, here seated in the brown chair.  Advertised as the “Original Doll Mannikin,” her body was jointed in 16 places—neck, shoulders, upper arms, elbows, wrists, waist, hips, knees and ankles—allowing her to assume a wide variety of poses. Produced until 1962, this version has a hard plastic body and a vinyl head. 

 Everything old is new again, as shown by this modern BJD (ball jointed doll) in the white wicker chair. In 1999, the Japanese corporationVolks introduced “Super Dolfie,” a posable ball-jointed resin doll aimed at adult collectors. The popularity of the dolls created an entire industry of BJD dolls, first in Japan, then spreading to Korea and China. Soon companies in the United States and Europe were creating BJDs, as well as many doll artists. Innovations such as interchangeable face plates, eyes wigs, hands, and feet inspired collectors to customize their dolls. This example is Volks Super Dollfie or SD Kira.

 From 1955 through1960s, American Character produced its own multi-jointed hard plastic doll, Toodles, a beautiful baby doll with jointed elbows and knees. She was advertised as being able to pose in 1,000 different positions.

Women Doll Artists; Rose O'Neill

Born in 1874, Rose O'Neill demonstrated her artistic talents early when at the age of 13 she won an newspaper art contest. By the age of 19, she was living in New York City as a professional artist, illustrating books, magazine articles, and advertisements. In the December 1909 issue of Ladies' Home Journal O'Neill's most famous creation appeared, the chubby cheerful Kewpie, whom O'Neill described as "a sort of little round fairy whose one idea is to teach people to be merry and kind at the same time".  Her Kewpie cartoons were a popular hit and in 1912 the German doll company J.D. Kestner began to manufacture her appealing imps in bisque.  Kewpie dolls would later be made in cloth, celluloid, and composition, and O'Neill would expand her cast of Kewpieville characters to include others, such as the toddler Scootles and Doodle Dog, a canine companion to the Kewpies.   O'Neill published and illustrated a number of children's books featuring her Kewpies, but she was much more than the creator of the Kewpie.  She wrote and illustrated novels and books of poetry and continued to produce fine artwork.  After studying with famed French sculptor Auguste Rodin, O'Neill created sculptural works as well.  An ardent advocate for women's rights, O'Neill was active in the suffragist movement, creating cartoons and posters promoting the right of women to vote.  

This trio of bisque Kewpie dolls belongs to member Beverly Evans.  The pudgy pup is Doodle Dog.

This composition Kewpie was the childhood doll of member Sylvia McDonald and is wearing a dress crocheted by Sylvia's grandmother.   Sylvia members her parents struggling (ultimately with success) to restring her beloved doll, using a strip of rubber from an old inner tube from the family car and a bent a coat hanger.