Major doll auction will be held Oct. 23 near Kansas City A single-owner collection of over 125 rare and vintage dolls – nearly all of them made in France and Germany between the late 19th and early 20th centuries – will be sold at auction Saturday, Oct. 23.
News-Antique.com - Sep 23,2010 - (BLUE SPRINGS, Mo.) – A nice single-owner collection of over 125 rare and vintage dolls – nearly all of them made in France and Germany between the late 19th and early 20th centuries – will be sold at auction Saturday, Oct. 23, by Browne Auction Specialists at the American Legion Hall in Blue Springs, just outside Kansas City. The sale will begin at 1 p.m.
The collector passed away a year ago and her identity will not been revealed for security reasons until the day before the sale, per the wishes of her family. “But if we were able to give her name, it would be recognizable to people in the doll collecting community; that’s how highly regarded she was,” said Ron Browne of Browne Auction Specialists. “This is a rare opportunity to acquire some great dolls.”
The collection was amassed between 1970 and 1990 and includes manufacturers such as Armand Marseille, Borgfeldt, Heinrich Handwerck, Hertel Schwab & Co., J.D. Kestner, Heubach, Simon & Halbig, S.F.B.J., Cuno and Otto Dressel, Kuhnlenz, Bahr & Proschild, Unis and others. In addition, several Kewpie dolls made in America will be offered as a single lot.
Online bidding will be facilitated by LiveAuctioneers.com. Phone and absentee bids will also be accepted. Previews will be held on Friday, Oct. 22, from noon to 5 p.m., and on Saturday, Oct. 23, the date of sale, from 9 a.m. until the first gavel comes down at 1 p.m. Lunch will be provided on auction day. “I encourage all doll collectors to attend this sale,” Mr. Browne said.
Quite possibly the most plentiful dolls in the sale will be those made by the German manufacturer Armand Marseille,one of the world's largest and best known producers of bisque doll heads. The firm started in the mid-1890s and between 1900 and 1930 they reportedly made 1,000 bisque head dolls a day. The very popular 370 and 390 molds will be featured in the sale.
Hertel, Schwab & Company is another German manufacturer from the period that will be represented in the auction. Some of their dolls were made just for the American market (like Bye-Lo Baby for George Borgfelt, Our Baby and Our Fairy for Louis Wolf & Company and Jubilee Dolls for Strobel & Wilken. They also made bisque heads for other German doll firms.
The aforementioned George Borgfelt was based in New York City and was an importer and assembler of dolls for the American and Canadian doll markets. They were not doll makers themselves. But they did hold the distribution rights to many dolls from European manufacturers. Some, like the nice 25-inch bisque head doll with blue sleep eyes in the sale, are marked “GB.”
The Dressel family toy and doll business in Sonnenberg, Germany operated for a long time and passed from one generation to then next before finally becoming known as the Cuno & Otto Dressel Factory in 1873. They purchased bisque doll heads from several manufacturers. An example in the Oct. 23 auction is
