Santa—All Dressed Up and Everywhere to Go

 

QUESTION: For most of my adult life, I’ve been discovering and purchasing unique Santa dolls with the image printed on fabric and stuffed. I know virtually nothing about these dolls. I started collecting them because I liked them—they were fun. What can you tell me about my dolls?

ANSWER: Most people are more familiar with a variety of Santa toys and decorations, including many made of plastic from the mid-20th century on. But the origins of these dolls go back a lot further.

The British call him Father Christmas. The French Pere Noel. The Germans Kris Kringle. The Dutch Sinterklaas. To Americans, he’s Santa Claus.

Pictures and drawings depicted him as a tall, stately, thin man wearing bishop’s robes, with a broad-rimmed hat, and big breeches. He smoked a long pipe and rode a white horse or rode in a wagon. 

The original 17th-century British Father Christmas, wore a dark beard, and his clothing  was green, not red. Early representations of Father Christmas saw him dressed in green, representing the green shoots of spring in the depths of winter. Scandinavian myths contributed to Santa’s reindeer-pulled sleigh.  His elves have a Germanic and distinctly devilish background.

Father Christmas’s first name, “Father,” originated in pre-Christian times. Historians believe it evolved from ‘Woden’, or the better known “Odin,” the chief god of North European and Scandinavian mythology. Americans prefer to refer to him as Santa Claus, and this name derives from the 3rd century saint, Nicholas. He was a charitable bishop from Myra in Turkey. He delivered his first gifts of bags of gold coins  anonymously to a man so that a he could afford to have his daughters married. Some accounts say he left a gold coin in each of the daughters’ stockings and in others that he dropped his gifts down the man’s chimney because the door was locked.

But the Santa known by American children appeared on December 24, 1822 in New York City. That was the day that Clement Moore penned the Night Before Christmas. 

His poem inspired artists to draw the character of Santa Claus based on Moore’s descriptions. His poem first appeared in book form in 1848, illustrated by T.C. Boyd. Over the years, many other artists have created their own interpretations of Santa Claus. The most famous are the ones done by Thomas Nast which appeared in Harper’s Weekly from 1863 to 1866.

As with many things designed for children, the idea of Santa Claus grew and grew. Soon American companies began producing Santa toys, including Santa Claus dolls. Edward Peck designed one of the oldest dolls, produced by the New York Stationary Envelope Company. Made from 1884 to 1886, this lithographed cloth doll may have been the first commercially made type of doll in the United States.

Peck’s Santa was a forerunner of the Santa later made by Celia and Charity Smith for the Arnold Print Works, one of the country’s largest producers of printed cloth dolls. 

Santa dolls have included both stuffed immovables and animated characters. Many of the stuffed Santas that exist today are the kind that mothers cut and stuffed at home. Because these dolls rarely had marks, it’s difficult to date them. The other thing to consider is that many of these cut and sew at home are replicas of toys from the past.

Antique cloth Santas are nearly impossible to find because they’ve already been purchased and are part of collections. But collectors are still interested in Santas of any material made from 1900 on. Cloth Santas of the 1940s and 1950s have grown in popularity with collectors, with the Coca-Cola Santas selling for the highest prices if they’re still holding their bottles of Coca-Cola. Next in line is the Pepsi Santa.

The Santas from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s are the least valuable. While prices vary, the differences are because Christmas and Santa collectors often pay more for a Santa than a doll collector.

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 2022/2023 Winter Holiday Edition, with the theme "Winter Memories," 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 Snowman

 

QUESTION: I have two George Durrie prints I'm trying to find out about. I know that One is called “Home to Thanksgiving” and the other one is “The Road-Winter.”  What can you tell me about George Durrie and his prints?

ANSWER: George Henry Durrie’s work has often been confused with that of Currier & Ives. He dealt with the same subjects, mostly rural winter themes, and his style is very similar. This is no accident, for while Durrie painted on his own, Currier & Ives marketed his work after their firm became the premier seller of hand-colored lithographs.

Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1820, the son of a stationer John Durrie, he studied off and on with local portraitist Nathaniel Jocelyn from 1839 to 1841. After mastering his painting skills, Durrie traveled throughout his home state of Connecticut and then through New Jersey doing portraits on commission. In his record book, Durrie lists portraits sold during visits to the Connecticut towns of Bethany, Hartford, Naugatuck, and Meriden. He also traveled successfully to Freehold, New Jersey, and Petersburg, Virginia. 

By 1845 local newspapers carried advertisements for Durrie's 'snow pictures' and his Sleighing Party was exhibited at the National Academy of Design in that year. Landscapes, which had first appeared as backgrounds in his portraits, became his primary focus. He painted local landmarks such as East Rock and West Rock, as well as composite scenes of rural life. Country inns and barnyards, scenes of human activity, became his most oft-used subjects. While he painted these in all seasons, his depictions of them in winter were the most numerous, growing in frequency between 1854 and 1863. 

He became so known for his snow scenes that people called him “The Snowman.” Durrie was a meticulous artist, including fine details in his scenes, providing a record of 19th-century rural life. He paid special attention to the foliage and animals in his paintings, making them all the more realistic. But his method was more stylistic than realistic, catering to nostalgic images of farm life that people liked, rather than brutally realistic ones. Pioneers who had traveled West from New England especially liked them.

Though he began painting New England summer farm scenes, he soon discovered that if he added snow to them they became more appealing to the public. Durrie has been credited with adding the “snowscene” into American painting, creating a wintry ambiance that can be found on many Christmas cards today. 

Almost all of his compositions are small, with few being larger than 18 x 24 inches. His scenes were still and intimate. He knew and admired the works of Thomas Cole and tried to emulate Cole's style, yet he was more drawn to the compositional complexity and expansiveness of the Hudson River School, the leading school of American landscape painting at the time. He used a wide angle view in his compositions with people in them being close enough to be within hailing distance. Durrie’s paintings had a storytelling content that made them pleasant, accessible images to the average viewer.

His early landscapes were often of local landmarks and other local scenes, which were popular with his New Haven clients, and he painted numerous variations of popular subjects. As his portrait commissions declined, Durrie concentrated on landscapes. He wanted a wider audience, and he seemed to have a good sense of what would sell. Durrie realized that his paintings would have a wider appeal if he made them as generic New England scenes rather than as identifiable local scenes, retaining a sense of place without specifying where that place actually was. 

The New York City lithographic firm of Currier & Ives knew their audience; the American public wanted nostalgic scenes of rural life, images of the good old days, and Durrie’s New England scenes fit the bill perfectly. Lithographic prints were a very democratic form  of art, cheap enough that the humblest home could afford some art to hang on the wall. Durrie had been marketing his paintings in New York City, and Currier and Ives, who had popularized such prints, purchased some of Durrie’s paintings in the late 1850s or early 1860s, and eventually published 10 of his pictures beginning in 1861  and the artist's death in New Haven in 1863. Currier & Ives published six additional Durrie prints posthumously. Among his most popular prints were "Cider Making," "Winter in the Country," "Getting Ice," and "Winter Morning."

"Home to Thanksgiving," painted in 1861 and one of Durrie’s snow landscapes, became one of Currier and Ives’ most popular prints. Currier & Ives published the large-folio print from it in 1867. The print originally sold for $1.50. Today, an original of this print sells for many times that. 

The popularity of Durrie’s snow scenes received an additional boost in the 1930s, when the Traveler’s Insurance Company began issuing calendars featuring Currier and Ives prints. Starting in 1946, the January calendar always featured a Durrie snow scene. Of Durrie’s 125 paintings, 84 were of snow scenes, making him the most prolific snow scene painter of his time.

Critics dismissed George Durrie as a popular artist, an illustrator rather than a fine artist—an common opinion at the time. They considered anyone painting commercially for payment a hack. While in theory art should be for all the people, those who support the fine arts would rather keep the riff-raff at bay. Ironically, it was the common man who made Durrie’s work famous.

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 "Antiques of Christmas" in the 2021 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.

Stuck on Beauty

 

18th-century paper 

QUESTION: While touring some historic houses, I’ve often marveled at the beautiful wallpapers on their interior walls. I’ve always loved wallpaper. In fact, every room in the house I grew up in had wallpaper on the walls. But getting it off was such a chore that many people turned to painted walls instead. I’d love to know how wallpaper originated and some of the history behind its use. Can you help me?

ANSWER: People have adorned their walls for centuries. During the Middle Ages, the wealthy hung woolen tapestries to help keep out the cold. Later, painted cloths came into fashion. And through the evolution of interior decoration—wallpaper. 

Early on, makers of wallpaper used the same wooden printing blocks used on textiles on heavy paper. Most likely its introduction to Europe occurred in the 16th century, following the Dutch trade with China and Japan. Dutch ships returned from the Far East with exotic decorated papers when they then exported to England and France. 

Hanging wallpaper sheet

The first wallpapers to appear in Europe were small, approximately 12 to 18 inches square and very expensive. Merchants used the earliest wallpapers to decorate the insides of cupboards and smaller rooms in their houses. 

Up until the late 18th century, creators of these small squares of wallpaper hand painted them. That made hanging the paper difficult because many times those smaller pieces didn’t join together very well. As a result, there were gaps, and designs and patterns didn’t meld together that well.

Others attached pieces to frames and let them hang freely. The dark, damp halls of chateaus and manor houses were usually drafty, so people placed these hanging papers where they might cut down on drafts that blew through the large open areas and hallways.

Ancient Roman scene in frame

Many early wallpapers featured stylized floral motifs and simple pictorial scenes copied from contemporary embroideries and other textiles. Makers printed them in monochrome, in black ink on small sheets of paper. It wasn’t until the mid-17th century that wallpaper makers joined the single sheets together to form long rolls, a development that also encouraged the production of larger repeats and the introduction of block-printing. In this process, printers engraved onto the surface of a rectangular wooden block. Then they inked the block with paint and placed it face down on the paper for printing. Polychrome patterns required the use of several blocks----one for every color. They printed each color separately along the length of the roll, which they then hung up to dry before the next color could be applied. “Pitch” pins on the corners of the blocks helped the printer to line up the design. The process was laborious and required considerable skill.

French wallpapers

A number of fine French wallpapers offered different themes than those of the classic English papers. Often, the French papers displayed floral patterns, and many rendered figures from history and literature, whereas the English wallpapers favored landscape and bucolic compositions.

When wallpaper arrived in Colonial America, it was much too expensive for many to afford. Rather than pay the expensive costs for the wallpaper, many continued to paint or stencil their walls. However, some people found the imitation French papers affordable and applied them to their walls in small pieces instead.

Out of proportion design

The floral designs and landscape scenes commonly found were sometimes primitive, with houses and trees out of proportion. The skill of the artist or paperhanger directly affected the appearance of wallpaper. The progression leading to those long rolls of wallpaper allowed people to decorate large expanses of wall space without dividing the areas into those small panels.

By the early 19th century, expensive, imported wallpapers decorated the walls of prominent New England homes. Those papers were of various designs and patterns, and some of them depicted scenes from Greek and Roman mythology. American historical scenes were also popular.

Block printing wallpaper

Up until 1840 all wallpaper makers employed the slow, labor intensive block printing process. So manufacturers wanted to find ways to speed up production. Potters & Ross, a cotton printing firm based in Darwen, Lancashire, England, patented the first wallpaper printing machine in 1839. Adapting the methods used in the printing of calico fabric, the paper passed over the surface of a large cylindrical drum and received an impression of the pattern from a number of rollers arranged around its base. Troughs beneath each one simultaneously inked the rollers with colors. The first machine-printed papers appeared thin and colorless beside the richer and more complex effects of block-printing and most had simple floral and geometric designs with small repeats.

Wallpaper evolved into an art form. One example depicted the Scottish Highlands, complete with sportsmen stalking deer. Another showed a scene of Italian peasants dancing and harvesting grapes. And yet another depicted riders leaping fences.

Historic panorama scene wallpaper

Victorian wallpaper floral

The frieze-filling-dado wallpaper scheme highlights the popularity of wallpaper in Victorian homes. In 1868 as a way of breaking up the monotony of a single pattern on the wall, and by 1880 it was a standard feature in many fashionable interiors. The dado paper covered the lower part of the wall, between the skirting board and chair rail; above this hung the filling, and above this the frieze. And as if three different wallpapers weren’t enough decoration for any room, the scheme was often combined with ceiling papers to complete the densely-patterned effects. Ideally, the frieze should have been light and lively, the filling, a retiring, all-over pattern, and the dado should be darker to withstand dirt and wear and tear. Co-ordinating papers, printed in muted greens, reds, yellows and golds, could be extremely attractive but the frieze-filling-dado-ceiling combination often led to visual overload. Hallways and stairs benefitted best from this wallpaper treatment. But by 1900 ceiling papers had disappeared and, in artistic interiors, wide friezes hung above plain or simple paneled walls.

Antique wallpapers are of interest to several kinds of collectors. Some might be interested in specific themes or designs, such as papers depicting historical scenes, or those displaying floral patterns; wallpapers from England or France or some other country might engage the attention of others; still, some individuals like to collect papers produced by certain manufacturers, such as Cole & Son or William Morris. And some of  those assembling a collection might be interested in a certain time period such as wallpapers manufactured in the 17th or 18th 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 railroad antiques in "All Aboard!" in the 2021 Summer 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.