By Cindy Weir
I almost missed the rare old doll featured in today’s article when I photographed and inventoried the Vigo County Historical Museum’s doll collection in the summer of 2004. She is displayed downstairs in the basement hall in a sealed glass front cabinet with other African American memorabilia from Terre Haute.
This beauty with a fired brown bisque head is on a good quality fully jointed old brown composition body. She has large soft brown glass sleep eyes and an open mouth with tiny teeth. The doll wears her original blue and white striped cotton dress and black curly wig. Unlike many of the black bisque dolls of the era that were merely painted versions of white dolls, this doll has distinctively African American features and a sweet childlike face. She looks like she is ready to step out of the case and play a game of hopscotch or jump rope. She was made in Germany around 1910-1915 by the well-known and respected doll manufacturer, Simon Halbig.
This doll is very desirable to antique doll collectors because she is rare, but even more because of her lovely character face. Black bisque dolls were made from 1880 on, but the character type didn’t come on the scene until about 1910. They range in color from dark black to light brown. Some have fired on color and others are cold painted with a finish that easily scratches showing the white bisque below. Some have comic exaggerated features, others are literally factory painted over versions of white dolls, and a few have natural and appealing very realistic African American features like the museum’s doll.
Simon Halbig was one of the few German doll manufacturers who shortly after the turn of the century (1900) started experimenting with character dolls whose faces looked more like real children. Most of the dolls were caucasian but a few were black.
We are lucky to have this rare black character doll in the Museum. Character dolls were made for just a short period of time and are a special part of doll manufacturing history when doll making was truly an art form, but they sadly were victims of world politics. Please come visit her and her friends at the museum.
