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Issues of 2008
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The doll – a microcosmos of its own
Francois Theimer was born in Strasbourg. He studied economy. The he moved to Paris and opened a toyshop on Montmartre. He restored dolls, organized a special doll festival and edited a magazine on the history of the French doll, Polichinelle. In 1980 he organized the First International Congress of Collectors in Paris, which was succeeded by such congresses in other countries. Theimer is a graduated specialist in the field of the French doll history, the director of a fashionable auction in Paris, professor of the School of Arts and Communications, where he reads the art market sociology. For more than thirty years, he studies the doll history and knows a lot about those who created them.
— Who is the initiator, the Ùo¬called «father» of the French doll industry? — Strange, but it was in fact a woman. It is really strange, because in those times the production of dolls as all the other businesses were run by men. The most expensive and famous brands such as Bru, Steiner, Denamur, Thuillier, Jumeau were totally in the hands of men. However, they only improved and developed, what Mlle, Huret, a real French doll queen, created in the 1850-s. Her appearance in that particular epoch was not occasional. Ideas of the French Enlightment, romanticism with its appeal to sentiments, works of J.J. Russo, paying attention to the development of the spiritual world of a child, all these things greatly influenced the activities. She stemmed from a wealthy family, was perfectly educated. Her mother died early, the father was a royal mechanic and was very busy at his work. Her uncle, a police prefect and a great theatric fan, brought her up. The girl loved theatric clothes and once decided to sew a dress for an old wooden doll by herself. However, taking the doll, she exclaimed, «What a heavy ugly thing! How dared one to give it to the children?!» In 1850, she started her own business, Maison Huret, a factory, producing a hundred French Fashion dolls per year. Since nowadays, they are held to be the best, and all the other doll producers followed the M-lle Huret’s principles since that time on. — What were these principles? — Esthetics and beauty, correct body proportions and height of a toy (for the convenience of a child playing with a toy its height must be somewhat of a one third of the height of a child). M-lle Huret pioneered many fields. She invited professional sculptors to take part in the creation of dolls. At first, they mastered a doll’s head of the natural human size and then reduced it to the doll size. Nobody used «biscue» porcelain previously for the production of the doll heads, which permitted to produce dolls with subtle spiritual faces. The «biscue» porcelain was regular white porcelain, fired, however, at temperature lower than the regular porcelain (about 1000 degrees Celsius), leaving it still porous and with matt surface, able to absorb glazing. Frankly speaking, the idea was produced and patented by a porcelain craftsman, Jacob Poti, however, after the patent had expired, M-lle Huret used the principle. She wanted the children be able to play with her toys bending and unbending their hands and legs, turning their heads and palms. That’s why she started to produce dolls with bodies of gutta-percha (a Malaysian rubber-like gym). The material, however, was not durable, after a short period of time it hardened and crumbled. In 1861, this made her, taking the dummies for painters as a starting point, launch the production of dolls with ball and socket joints and turning heads. Before M-lle Huret, the dolls just copied the images of adult women. She was the first to produce a girl-doll. Emile Jumeau only developed her idea by introducing his Bebe Jumeau in 1870. The clothes for dolls have a special history. Before Huret, the dolls were clothed in dresses, which were sawn so that it was impossible to remove the dresses without tearing them. Her dolls had several changeable sets of clothes, which could stimulate girls to start sewing themselves clothes for their dolls.
— What was the Mlle. Huret’s destiny and where one could see her dolls today? — She got the patent for her dolls in 1850, and worked hard to improve the production. After becoming very reach, she sold her business out. She died in 1904 at the age of ninety. She neither was married, nor had children… Today her dolls survived only in a few museums and private collections. Their prices are in a range between fifteen and one hundred thousands of dollars. However, the history of Maison Huret was rather long and lased nearly eighty years. A lot of owners of the Huret’s business were women. The last such woman in 1921 was a Polish lady, immigrated to France in the years of WW I, M-me Lazarskaya. — French dolls dominated in the world up to the early 20th century. What happened after? — The Germans ever more aggressively seized one piece of the doll market after another. They were perfect organizers, though less artistic than the French. That’s why they used to send their craftsmen to Paris, and copied a lot from the French. The Germans leaped forward, introducing the so-called «character» dolls bearing particular expression on their faces, the ones that are so highly valued by the today’s collectors. — Were there other attempts of the revival of the doll industry in France? — After WWI many men perished in battles, the woman taking over their businesses, the birth rate drop dramatically. The doll factories went buncrupt on the grounds of insufficient demand. In that period, a new kind of the dolls, the «boudouire» dolls of purely decorative character emerged. Art Deco and Puaret’s works influenced greatly this art of the dolls.After the WWII, the surge of the birth rate dictated the domination of mass produced cheap kinds of dolls, with the famous Barbie dolls as an example.
— Tell us, please about the toy and doll auctions that you organize in Paris. Who are the participants and what are the trends? — Auctions are organized once in a two months period. Usually we provide more than three hundred lots for the sales. The popularity yearly grows as well as the number of participants. In the most of the antique fields collectors are males, however, it is totally different with the dolls. Most of the doll collectors are women. Eighty percents of the collectors are foreigners, mostly Japanese and Americans. Sometimes the Russians visit us. In general, Europeans account for only a small percent of the buyers (Frenchmen for only five percents). It is sad, but the market in France became smaller, for the old toys are not interesting to the Barbie generation. I explain it by the lack of culture in the younger generation. — You mean that Americans are more cultured people? Why the fashion doll collecting is so popular in the US? — The reasons are purely social and economic. We have a rather patriarchal society here in Europe. It is mostly the men, who control here the money. In the USA, there are a lot of rich independent women interested in collecting dolls. — All your life you deal with antique dolls … Have you sometimes felt that you are soaking in a mysterious world in the style of the E.T.A. Hoffmann’s tales? — Know what? I do not seek any mysticism in this thing. First of all I consider the dolls as a unique esthetic phenomenon. I am not the only man who sets a goal of acknowledging them as an independent particular subject of art. Also, I consider the dolls presenting a microcosm of its own inside the human life including also the great and amazing variety of destinies of their creators. I was always interested in the biographies of doll producers and today. I know a lot about this wonderful and dramatic world. Many of the craftsman died in poverty, even committed suicide, and today their dolls are worth of fortune. This variety of talents and individualities permits us to call that wonderful though rather short period «The Golden Age of The French Fashion Dolls».
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