The World in Miniature

 

QUESTION: My great grandfather made a dollhouse for his daughter, who passed it down to her daughter, my grandmother, who passed it on to her daughter, my mother, who then passed it on to me. It’s a grand house, all handmade of wood. He styled it to the Victorian houses of the time. Over the years, each owner furnished it differently using both commercially made and homemade furnishings. When did little girls begin playing with dollhouses? And does my dollhouse have any value?

ANSWER: Dollhouses, in one form or another, have existed for centuries, most likely beginning with the ancient Egyptians. Archaeologists discovered the earliest known examples in the Egyptian tombs of the Old Kingdom, created nearly 5,000 years ago. They placed small clay replicas of their houses and belongings in and around burials to provide the comforts of home to the deceased in the afterlife. Although today’s dollhouses are different from these ancient ones, they include purposes other than play. Over the last five centuries, dollhouses have evolved from elaborate displays for adults, to household teaching tools, to objects of imagination  for children. 

Today's dollhouses can be traced back to the 16th century’s German baby house display cases, later found in The Netherlands and England. Known as a “dockenhaus,” meaning miniature house, “cabinet house,” or “baby house” (because of its size), these handcrafted items were not initially made for children to play with—they served as display cases for wealthy adults to fill with miniature furniture, fabrics, and artwork that reflected their own taste and lifestyle. 

One of the earliest examples of a dollhouse  was the Munich Baby House. Albrecht V, Duke of Bavaria, commissioned it between 1557 and 1558. It consisted of a cabinet display case made up of individual rooms. Dollhouses of this period showed idealized interiors complete with detailed furnishings and accessories. Artisans built cabinets by hand with architectural details, filled with miniature household items. The baby moniker referred to the scale of the houses rather than them being for babies. They were off-limits to children and were meant to house trophy collections of wealthy women. 

In the early 17th century, baby houses took on a more practical purpose. Nuremberg houses and Nuremberg kitchens, named for their primary place of manufacture in Germany, emerged as educational tools to teach young women how to decorate and care for a household. These versions of baby houses were less ornamental than their predecessors, typically made entirely out of metal and sometimes consisting of just a kitchen. But they were no less meticulous, featuring tiny handcrafted brooms, kettles, copper cooking pots, and mini masonry hearths at the heart of the kitchen. 

Between 1686 and 1710, gentlemen often possessed "cabinets of curiosities" to hold collections of various objects they had acquired in their lives and travels: indeed such a cabinet would often reside in a small reception room. In the Amsterdam of the Dutch Golden Age, their wealthy wives similarly created dollhouses as status symbols. 

By the 18th century, baby houses had become popular in England. The term “baby” in the baby house came from the Old English word meaning doll. These structures commonly had detailed and realistic facades, including doors and windows, informing what we commonly think of as the classic Victorian dollhouse. Craftsmen often modeled them after the owner’s home, and although they still functioned as displays of opulence, caring for them and decorating them also became a beloved hobby for women. Until the mid-18th century, dollhouses were unique, one-of-a-kind creations.

Most people know dollhouses as toy houses made in miniature. Since the early 20th century, dollhouses have been primarily for children, but the collection of them is for  adults.

Originally, dollhouses weren’t made to scale. By the time manufacturers began to mass produce them, the scale of 1:12 or 1" scale became the standard.

Germany produced the most prized dollhouses and doll house miniatures up until World War I. The doll houses were produced in Nuremberg, Germany; which, since the 16th century, was coined as the 'toy city.' Their baby houses were thought to be the origin for the basic standards of contemporary doll houses. Notable German miniature companies included Märklin, Christian Hacker, Moritz Reichel, Rock and Graner, and others.

The Bliss Manufacturing mass-produced the first dollhouses in the United States in the 1890s, even as the U.S. imported them and miniature furnishings from Germany. Despite becoming more mainstream in the early 1900s, dollhouses didn’t become affordable for most families until after World War II. The postwar economic boom, along with increased manufacturing materials and abilities, made them fixtures in playrooms throughout country.

The TynieToy Company of Providence, Rhode Island, made authentic replicas of American antique houses and furniture in a uniform scale beginning in about 1917. Other American companies of the early 20th century were Roger Williams Toys, Tootsietoy, Schoenhut, and the Wisconsin Toy Company. 

After World War II, manufacturers produced dollhouses in factories on a larger scale with less detailed craftsmanship than before. By the 1950s, the typical dollhouse was made of painted sheet metal filled with plastic furniture. Such houses cost little enough that the majority of girls could own one.

In the United States, most houses have an open back and a fancy facade, while British houses are more likely to have a hinged front that opens to reveal the rooms.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "Lady Luck" in the 2024 Fall Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

What Exactly is a Pier Table?

 

QUESTION: I like to visit historic houses. Invariably, the first stop is by a narrow table in the main hall. Next to it usually stands a hall tree. The docent usually begins by telling us that the women of the house would stand in front of this narrow table and adjust their petticoats using the mirror placed behind it. This seems like a plausible explanation. When and how did this practice begin? And why is the table called a “pier” table? According to the dictionary, a pier is a structure leading from the shore out to sea, used as a boat landing or for entertainment. 

ANSWER: The English language can be complicated. There are many words that sound the same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. Over time, the word “peer,” meaning to look through a window with difficulty, may have been confused with the word “pier,” a seaside structure used for landing boats or for entertainment. Since most people coming to the United States in the 18th and 19th centuries spoke a different language—even British English was different than American English—it’s only natural that along the way, the two words got confused. It’s also likely that because a pier table juts out from the wall that it resembled a pier jutting out from the shore.

Docents in historic houses always seem to have interesting stories about the furniture in them. One of these concerns the pier table. Supposedly, Southern women would stop in front of it and check the mirror below it to see if their petticoats were showing before going out. However, there are two things wrong with this story. First, the table did not appear primarily in the South, and second, women of the 19th century did no such thing. A woman of the time wouldn’t have been caught dead adjusting her undergarments in a public area of her house.  Besides that, the architecture of the table, with the top projecting forward, well out over the mirror, prevents anyone, male or female from actually seeing beyond  the area of their feet.

So what exactly is a pier table? Simply, it’s a low, usually narrow table that stands in the pier, or wall section between two windows, often in the parlor of a wealthier person’s house. Cabinetmakers often made them in pairs of expensive woods, such as mahogany, rosewood, and giltwood. Unfortunately, ill informed curators of historic homes—originally wealthy women who joined groups who raised money to restore and manage historic homes—had heard the story of the pier table and placed it in the main hall where it didn’t belong in the first place. 

The pier table first appeared in continental Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and became popular in England in the last quarter of the 17th century. The first known use of such a table in America was in 1765 and remained popular until the mid 19th century.

During the Regency Period from 1800 to 1830, a pier table had a mirror mounted between its back legs against the wall, or sometimes above it. The purpose of the mirror was to reflect the light around the room, not to check petticoats. The mirrors were often slightly angled towards the ceiling in order to catch as much light as possible, thus precipitating the fictional account. The extensive use of concave looking glasses in the 18th century and mirrors in the 19th century bounced the dim light from oil lamps around the room, increasing overall brightness. The mirror also reflected the pattern in the tile or carpet and helped make the room feel larger.

Eventually, pier tables became symbols of wealth. Reflecting light around a room on highly-polished surfaces, including mirrors, glass, crystal pendants on chandeliers, or fine wood surfaces, was a way of demonstrating wealth. It dazzled the eye and demonstrated a great deal of labor from servants who maintained that high degree of cleanliness.

At the beginning of the 19th century, cabinetmakers around Philadelphia usually produced pier tables in the Chippendale style. They used Chippendale’s English design and traditional construction techniques since most had been trained by English cabinetmakers. The table became an American staple in larger homes during the Federal Period in the early 19th century, primarily in the Northern states, not in the South. 

The most commonly seen example of the table is in the Classical style of the early 1800s, usually with a marble top and columns of some sort—often also marble—at each corner supporting the heavy top. But why a marble top on a hall table? These tables were almost always 30-inches high, the exact height of a dining room table. As such, they could be used in the dining room as an extra serving space without fear of damage from hot plates on the marble top.

The pier table reached it decorative zenith in the Empire period of the 1820s at the hands of such designers as Charles Honoré Lannuier, Thomas Hope and Joseph Meeks. The use of gilded caryatids—winged, female figures from Greek architecture—were frequently used as columns. Meeks used a set of lyres at each end to support the top.

One of the greatest designers of pier tables was French ébéniste Charles-Honoré Lannuier, who emigrated in 1803 and became one of the leading furniture makers in New York. Trained in Paris, he rose to fame during the American Federal Period. After the Revolutionary War and War of 1812, anti-English sentiment made French goods especially appealing to Americans. Lannuier imported French pattern books to keep abreast of the latest Napoleonic style. His work featured robustly carved and gilded caryatid supports, carved dolphin feet, and elaborate gilt-bronze ormolu mounts. And while not every wealthy person could afford a Lannuier pier table, his tables reached the height of design excellence in the first two decades of the 19th century.

After the Empire period, the Late Classicism style prevailed in the 1840s and 1850s with its large cyma curves, scrolled supports and undecorated expanses of crotch-cut mahogany veneer. This is the table that was frequently associated with the Southern plantation and the petticoat myth.

After the Civil War, the pier table came to be known as a console table, and that’s when it began appearing in the foyers and front hallways of houses of the wealthy. Generally speaking, console tables stood higher than their pier table counterparts. They also usually didn’t have mirrors behind them as lighting technology had greatly improved since the beginning of the 19th century. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "The Age of Photography" in the 2023 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Going Nuts for Nutcrackers

 

QUESTION: My family comes from a German background. When my ancestors first arrived in the United States back in the 1880s, they brought with them many of the customs and traditions. This included how we celebrated Christmas. My favorite job as a young boy was setting up the display of nutcrackers. I continued to do this until I left to go to college. But in all that time, no one ever explained to me how the tradition of nutcrackers at Christmas came to be. Could you please give me some history on them? 

ANSWER: Nutcrackers have been a part of Christmas ever since the first one appeared in human form in the 17th century. For Volker Fuchtner, making nutcrackers has been a family business ever since his great-great grandfather, Wilhelm Friedrich Fuchtner, created the classic wooden nutcracker in Germany's Erzgebirge region.

The Erzgebirge is a range of low, forested hills that form the border between the Czech Republic and the German state of Saxony. The town of Seiffen, which somehow managed to keep the woodworking tradition alive during the days of communist occupation, has more than 100 small family workshops, in which townspeople produce the nutcrackers. There are also huge replicas of the nutcrackers and other wooden figures all over town, and a visit to Seiffen at Christmas is special.

Mining used to be the main industry in the Erzgebirge—the name translates as "Ore Mountains"—but the silver, iron, tin and nickel eventually ran out. Woodworking then became a logical occupation for the people, since the region had abundant wood and rushing mountain streams to power their lathes and saws.

At first, woodcarvers made simple spindles, plates, staffs and common household articles, but they gradually turned to toys, notably cylindrical dolls produced with a lathe. Around 1870, some of the woodcarvers adapted these toys to become classic nutcrackers.

A classic nutcracker usually stands 14 to 18 inches tall and takes the form of a brightly painted king, soldier or some other stern authority figure with huge painted teeth, an upward curling moustache, and a nut-cracking mouth that reaches to his waist when open.

The fierce-looking nutcrackers served a purpose. Though Germans looked up to authority figures, they were also a bit resentful of them. The nutcrackers enabled the townspeople to make fun of them. The soldiers weren't limited to the original Ruritanian uniforms. They also sported spiked helmets or dressed as Russian hussars or British grenadiers. And there could be other fierce characters, including kings and robbers. The figures later appeared as more benevolent types from the German culture, such as night watchmen, chimney sweeps, gnomes, foresters, monks, and even Rumpelstilzchen.

The Grimm brothers, who collected the famous fairy tales, said in their dictionary, that a nutcracker was "often in the form of a misshapen little man, in whose mouth the nut, by means of a lever or screw, is cracked open.

There are about 120 steps in the making of a nutcracker, which explains why even new ones sell for $150 to $250. Woodworkers cut pieces of beech, maple, birch, linden and pine are cut into proper sized blocks, then leave them to season for up to two years in the open air under a roof. They do the first step in the manufacturing process on a lathe. Craftsmen turn the body and head as one cylindrical piece, with beveled shoulders and chiseled out areas for the nutcracker and lever. Others turn the arms and legs separately, fastening them to the body along with the stand.

After forming the body, a hand carver gives the figure a nose, a hat and whatever special features the particular character gets. Next come several layers of priming, after each of which the piece must thoroughly dry. Then a painter uses a fine brush to give the figure its eyes, moustache, teeth, decorative tunic, sword and other special features. Again, each coat of paint must dry before the painter applies another. Then comes the final assembly, in which another craftsmen adds the lever and glues on rabbit fur for hair, a beard, and sometimes even a moustache.

At least that’s how the nutcracker makers of the Erzgebirge do it. Each firm marks their genuine nutcracker with a stamp showing a stylized soldier on a hobbyhorse and the slogan ECHT ERZGEBIRGE HOLZKINST MIT HERZ or “Genuine Erzgebirge wooden art with heart.”

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "The Age of Photography" in the 2023 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

On the Lamm

 

QUESTION: My grandmother has been collecting fancy cups and saucers for several decades. Some in her collection are simple in design, but others are artistically decorated. Two sets have an unusual shape with pedestal cups decorated with ornate paintings. The mark on the bottom of the cup and saucer is a blue lamb with the word "Dresden" below it. Who produced these cups and saucers and when were they made?

ANSWER: Chances are that the two cups and saucers in your grandmother’s collection are from Dresden, Germany. Ceramic factories such as Rosenthal and Meissen produced blanks that were later decorated by independent studios. Ambrosius Lamm owned and operated one of the top decorating studios, producing consistently high quality wares. 

The city of Dresden became a leading cultural center in the 17th century. In the 18th century, the city became known as the "Florence on the Elbe" because of its magnificent Baroque architecture and its outstanding museums. Artists, especially  porcelain decorators, took up residence there.

Between 1855 and 1944, more than 200 painting studios existed in the city. The studios bought porcelain white ware from manufacturers such as Meissen and Rosenthal for decorating, marketing and reselling throughout the world. Ambrosius Lamm owned one of the top decorating studios consistently producing high quality wares.

Lamm operated a porcelain painting studio and arts and antique shop from 1887 to 1949. It was located at Zinzendorfstrasse 28 in Deesden. He had approximately 25 employees by 1894, which grew to about 40 in 1907. 

 studio became well known for painting in the Meissen, Vienna, and Copenhagen style. Lamm's specialties included Old Dresden flowers, Watteau and mythology, as well as decorated luxury and utility articles in the old and new styles. Lamm bought blanks from a number of manufacturing firms, including Meissen, Rosenthal, Hutschenreuther and Silesia.

Lamm used at least three different marks by Lamm, including a pensive angel with Dresden and Saxony, an L within a shield, and the most common mark, an outline of a lamb with Dresden underneath.

He also produced cabinet cups and saucers. Middle and upperclass Victorians often had display cabinets in their dining rooms in which they displayed fine decorated plates and cups and saucers. A set of six flared cups with scrolled handles, hand painted with French court beauties, such as Mme. Lebrun, sell for between $3,000 and 4,500.

Collectors can still find desirable cabinet cups, as well as sherbets and goblets can be found, decorated  on Rosenthal blanks with a gilt cutout star or flower inside the cup. Usually, well-painted portraits of men and women in period dress appeared on the outside with heavy gold paste work.

Lamm often used rich cobalt blue and luster glazes for his ground colors. His favorite decorative techniques were jeweling and beading. His studio was well known for using heavy intricate gold paste work on borders of plates and cups.

 also enjoyed painting cherubs or putti. Many of his pieces featured cherubs holding fruit, flowers, and playing musical instruments. He often portrayed them floating amid fluffy clouds.

His paintings on porcelain cups and saucers and cabinet plates rivaled the quality of Royal Vienna and Sevres porcelains.  For example, he pronounced a series of 12 plates portraying ones from various oil paintings displayed in the famous Scamper Gallery in the Zwinger Palace. These plates had cobalt blue borders with elaborate gold paste gilding.

Lamm’s excellent reputation as a top porcelain decorator encouraged wealthy families in Germany and abroad to commission demitasse sets and dinner services from his studio. These sets included the monogram of the owner in intricate gold work. Examples for sale today include dinner plates and serving items with one to four hand-painted courting scenes within medallions on the border.

 occasionally decorated dinnerware with the floral and gilt patterns typically used by other Dresden studios. But he preferred to be more creative in his designs. His studio produced a line of dinner and tea ware featuring bold, large vibrant flowers covering each piece. Lamm’s studio was particularly known for its artistic rendering of flowers.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about militaria in the 2022 Fall Edition, with the theme "After-Battle Antiques," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

The Art of Knokhloma

 

QUESTION: For years I’ve been collecting decorative wooden bowls and utensils that someone told me were Ukranian. They look to be some type folk art but I’m not sure how old the pieces I have actually are.  I’ve never seen or read anything about them, but their bright colors and attractive designs  really attracted me. I found most of the pieces in my collection at garage sales and fleamarkets. What can you tell me about the pieces in my collection?

ANSWER: The pieces in your collection aren’t Ukrainian but Russian—there’s a difference. In fact, they originated in the Kovernino District of the Nizhni Novgorod province north of Moscow. The painting style became to be known as Khokhloma. 

, which first appeared in the second half of the 17th century, is known for its curved and vivid mostly flower, berry and leaf patterns. The Firebird, a figure from the Russian fairytale, can also be used.

A combination of red, black, and gold are typical colors for Khokhloma. When artisans paint on wood, they use mostly red, black, green, yellow and orange  over a gold background. This makes the wooden tableware look heavier and metallic.

The production of painted dishes in Khokhloma is first mentioned in 1659 in the letter of a boyar called Morozov to his bailiff, containing an order for 100 painted dishes and 40 painted wine bowls.

The handicraft owes its origin to the Old Believers, who, fleeing from persecutions of officials, took refuge in the local woods. Even earlier, however, local craftsmen had experience in making tableware from soft woods. But it was icon-painters who taught them the special technique of painting wood in a golden color without the use of real gold.

The craftsmen carved utensils and dishes out of wood, then primed them with clay mortar, raw linseed oil, and tin powder. They then painted a floral pattern on top of this coating. After that, they coated the pieces with linseed oil and hardened them in a kiln at high temperatures. 

Artisans used two principal wood painting techniques on the Khokhloma—the  "superficial technique," red and black colors over a goldish one, and the "background technique," a goldish silhouette-like design over a colored background.

One of the villages where the art of Khokhloma painting had originally been practiced in ancient times grew to become a trading post to which the local craftsmen brought their wares for sale starting from the 18th century.

But it wasn’t until the end of the 19th century that Westerners first learned of the Khokhloma painting style through an exhibition in Paris. But by the early 20th century, the style seemed to be fading away, only to be revitalized during the Soviet times. 

The Khokhloma craftsmen united into artels in the 1920s to early 1930s. In the 1960s, the Soviets built a factory called the Khokhloma Painter near the Khokhloma village and another one in the town of Semyonov. These two factories have become the Khokhloma centers of Russia and still produce tableware, utensils,, furniture, and souvenirs.

The three colors—red, black, and gold—used in Khokhloma painting had a profound symbolism for decorating the sacred church vessels and the dishes and cups used in the monasteries and nunneries, as well as in icon ornaments. The red color represented beauty, the gold color symbolized the spiritual heavenly light, while the black color signified the cleansing of the human soul. The religious symbolism of colors has long been lost in the Khokhloma art but the precise and solemn scheme of colors inherent in the festive design of the "gilded" dishes grew to be traditionally used for decorating all wooden Khokhloma articles and made them especially favored by collectors.

There are families in the region famous for Khokhloma art who have been keeping secret formulas of painting materials and techniques, transferring them from one generation to the next for more than three centuries. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "Celebrating an Olde Fashioned Holiday" in the 2020 Holiday Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Marriages Made in Hell

QUESTION: I have inherited a cookie jar from my mother's estate, our family home outside Philadelphia. The cookie jar is marked on the bottom “Goldilocks #405 Patent Pending.” I see on the Internet that there are plenty of these jars in the marketplace. However, my cookie jar doesn't look like the one's I found with this mark. The design I have is slightly different. After a bit of research, I wondered if my version is a 'blank' that was simply uniquely printed or perhaps its just a rip off reproduction.  I have no clue. Can you help me solve this mystery?

ANSWER: What you have is the bottom of a Goldilocks cookie jar and the top of a Little Red Riding Hood cookie jar. The former was made by the Regal China Company and the latter by the Hull Pottery. Goldilocks has a blue hood and a little bear while Little Red Riding Hood has a red hood and a basket of flowers. The tops and bottoms of these cookie jars, though different in design, are interchangeable. What must have happened is that the top of the Goldilocks jar got broken and someone replaced it with the top of a Little Red Riding Hood jar. In antiques, we call this a marriage.

As in real life marriages where both people must work together to form a perfect union, antiques marriages can be either really good or terribly bad.

In the world of antiques, marriages are somewhat of a curse, especially when it comes to furniture. Here, a dealer joins together two different pieces of furniture worth significantly less than the original to form one piece that could be worth much more than the original. Novice antiques collectors could easily be fooled into spending more for a married piece than it’s actually worth.


Some unscrupulous antique dealers would no doubt try to pass off a married piece as an original while others marry parts together and literally make antiques. This is especially prevalent in the middle market where profit margins aren’t as high in the fine antiques one. This is especially true of antique furniture from the 17th to the 19th century. However, pieces made during this time often came in sections.

Back then, transporting large pieces of furniture was difficult. Pieces had to be transported in carts, and they had to be light enough that a small team of horses could pull them and two men could lift and carry them. So cabinetmakers produced furniture in pieces so that it could be easily transported and then assembled on site.

Of course, furniture that can be easily assembled is just as easy to disassemble. This meant that the end user could easily replace a broken or worn-out part of a piece of furniture without having to buy a new one. For example, if the table top splintered, the owner could simply keep the base and have a new top made. These combinations of old and new became the first married pieces of furniture.
But how does a novice collector know when a piece is a marriage? The more knowledgeable a collector is, the less chance he or she will have of getting taken.

Marriages are often easy to spot. First, look for any clash of styles. Cabinetmakers would not have combined furniture styles since most used style books to help them fashion their pieces. Second, check to see if there are any unusual proportions. Does one part seem larger than it should be? Third, does the wood used to make the piece match. While some cabinetmakers used less expensive wood for the frames, most used better wood for the exterior. Fourth, is the overall finish even. If not, this means parts of the piece have been finished at different times, such as a new table top. And finally, does the hardware match. Unless the owner couldn’t replace drawer and cabinet pulls with the same style, all the hardware on a piece should match.

Unfortunately, antiques marriages are contrived to deceive the buyer. A lot of this goes on in England where the market for antiques is always hot. Visitors especially usually have no idea what they’re buying and usually fall for marriage or even fake antiques.

One of the most common marriages is in 17th and 18th-century secretaries. The bottom desk is often married to a bookcase top from a different secretary. These two pieces may be orphans and when matched often look fairly good together. With the price of 18th-century secretaries in the six figure or more range, it’s no wonder that dealers try this. The easiest way to spot a marriage of this sort is to check the backboards. Those on the top and bottom must match, including nails. The quality of the wood must also be the same.

For chests and highboys, comparing a drawer from the top with one from the bottom should reveal the same dovetailing—all of which cabinetmakers did by hand—as well as linings.

Another popular marriage is an antique wrought iron sewing machine base that’s married to an antique table top. While this may look quite fine, it has little value.

But antiques marriages aren’t limited to furniture, although that’s where most of them occur. As with this cookie jar, like fitting pieces of ceramics or glassware can be married together. This usually falls into tops for bottoms as well as lids to jars and other containers.

Not so honest antiques dealers can deceive customers in many ways. A newer painting of a scene done in an old style can be mounted in an antique frame, for example, then sold as an antique.

But the most common marriages occur in higher end furniture where a piece that may not have sold for much or not at all is married to one that together forms a different piece that can sell for a whole lot. Don’t be fooled. Do your homework. And ask plenty of questions. The more you ask, the better chance of tripping up an unscrupulous dealer.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about  the Industrial Age n the 2020 Winter Edition, "The Wonders of the Industrial Age," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Onions Galore

QUESTION: I have several plates by Meissen with what I believe is called the Blue Onion pattern. Can you tell me more about it?


ANSWER: The Blue Onion pattern is the Meissen company’s most popular and has been for over 250 years.  Because Meissen never copyrighted it, more companies have copied it than any other ceramic pattern. But the pieces made by Meissen, itself, stand above the others because of the way its workers meticulously hand painted the design on each piece.


After Marco Polo introduced Chinese blue and white porcelains to Europe, the demand rose until by the beginning of the 18th century, Europeans clammered for more and more of the finely painted pieces. To satisfy this demand, the East India Company established trade with China and brought to Europe as much of the blue and white porcelain as it could.

But try as it might, the East India Company couldn’t keep up with the demand, so in 1710 Augustus the Strong formed a new porcelain company to produce blue underglaze decorations like those of the Chinese. Johann Gregor Höroldt, a talented porcelain painter who had worked for the Du Paquier Porcelain Company, a competitor of Meissen’s, perfected the blue underglaze paint, which the Meissen Company used to decorate its wares with the Blue Onion pattern, in 1739.

The model for this unique pattern most likely came from a flax bowl from the Chinese K'ang Hsi period, dating from 1662-1722. Originally, Meissen called it the “bulb” pattern. However, since Europeans were unfamiliar with the fruits and flowers shown on the original Chinese pieces, the Meissen artists created hybrids that were more familiar to the company’s customers. The so-called "onions" really aren’t onions at all, but stylized peaches and pomegranates modeled after the original Chinese pattern. They made the flower in the design a cross between a chrysanthemum and a peony and wove the stems of both the fruits and the flower around a stalk of bamboo.

As production continued, Meissen changed the pattern slightly. Originally, the fruits on the border pointed inward with the stem on the edge. But they altered this design by pointing the fruits alternatively inward and outward.

Not only did the Blue Onion pattern become Meissen’s most popular, but it also was its least expensive to produce. The company made money by using lower-paid “blue painters” as well as   apprentices to do the decorating. In addition, the pieces decorated with the pattern didn’t need a third firing which was necessary to fix the enamel decoration on Meissen’s other wares, plus the company decided not to add gilding to the standard pattern.

The Blue Onion pattern achieved popularity again during Victorian times when home furnishings became darker and heavier. It complemented the more elaborate Victorian furniture styles preferred by the new wealthy middle class. Immediately after the Civil War, the pattern took off. Everything from napkins to tablecloths, utensil handles to enameled cooking pots featured it. By the 1870s, the Meissen Company had adapted it to fit nearly every shape of porcelain ware it produced. To distinguish its Blue Onion pattern from those of its competitors, the company put its now famous emblem of Blue Crossed Swords at the foot of the design’s bamboo trunk in 1888.

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