Ruth Gibbs and Royal Copenhagen

What do butcher shops and dolls have in common?  Well, some dolls are made of various types of bone, especially ancient Coptic and Roman dolls, and the witch dolls Anne Rice made famous in the witching hour!  Don't forget the famous Beatles album deemed "The Baby Doll Album" where baby doll parts are hung with cuts of meat.  It is now worth thousands of dollars, but caused an uproar in its day.  I saw it at Sears when I was around 9; wish I'd lobbied to buy it!  

Also, G. Stanley Hall in A Study of Dolls (1897) writes that some children made dolls from meat!

My connection is that the local UPS access point is at Cattleman's Meat Market!  I picked up these wonderful dolls that I won at Theriault's Rendezvous auctions there. As my friend Mary Hillier used to say, dolls are where you find them!!

Ruth Gibbs Godey's Ladies were generally marked R.G./Ruth Gibbs on the back.  They came dressed in civil war or historic gowns and were china heads with china limbs.  Most were six inches or so, but larger 11 inch dolls were made;  the bigger dolls sometimes had luster necklaces and shoes.  Smaller dolls had shoes that matched their varied hair color, blonde, brunette or redhead, or luster shoes. The dolls I won are shown below; the large doll wears her original net underwear.  One doll is dressed as a bride.

My first two of these dolls were gifts to me when I was 9; they came in their original boxes, which I'd wished many times I had kept.

Gibbs dolls were made in Flemington, NJ.  Some had a pink tint to the China, once known as "pink luster", other rare dolls had brown glazed skin.  The Birmingham Doll Club of Alabama has an interesting post about them. Arlene M. Coleman has published a book on their history, available from Amazon. (Ruth Gibbs' Godeys' Little Ladies Dolls).  Their costumes are meant to remind one of the plates from Godey's Ladies Book, ed. Sara Josepha Hale, who helped give us Thanksgiving as we know it.

The doll below with the cool boots is a Danish china head; there are great articles and photos of these in John Noble's Dolls, and in Coleman's Encyclopedia, Vol. I.  This doll in its great clothes is a reissue by the Royal Copenhagen porcelain factories.  She was a doll on my bucket list.  If I can find the china head with teeth, once in the Laura Treskow collection, also featured in Coleman's under "teeth" and a sleep eye china, well I'll be ecstatic!

My Royal Copenhagen doll was made in the 1970s from an old mold.  Original dolls were often made during the 1840s and 50s, with some said to resemble Jenny Lind, while others were said to be more like Queen Victoria.  Their hair is brownish, not really black.

Royal Copenhagen has been made and collected since the firm was founded in 1775 by Queen Juliane Marie.  For more history, see Royal Copenhagen.com.  They are long loved for their blue and white china, especially their Christmas plates.  They made a doll based on one of their figurines, done in the blue and white palette, during the 80s.  I was able to find one of these, too.  I love having the plates and figurines as well.