The Strong
Play Partners:
National Museum of Play Online Collections
Baby Dolls | Barbie | Celebrity Dolls | Cloth and Rag Dolls | Collector Dolls | Doll Accessories | Dolls from the Early Twentieth Century | Dolls from the Fifties and Sixties | Dolls from the Nineteenth Century | Dolls from the Nineties to Now | Dolls from the Seventies and Eighties | Dolls from the Thirties and Forties | Fashion Dolls | Paper Dolls | Talking and Walking Dolls | More Dolls
doll
ca. 1850
A variety of German companies produced doll heads for sale in the United States. Most of these companies were located in the province of Thuringia, a region rich in the kaolin needed for the porcelain clay and rich in the wood used to fire up the kilns. Doll makers found porcelain a suitable material for the heads because it could be easily forced into molds with intricate details. The earliest doll heads were made with a press-mold method in which sheets of malleable clay were forced into a mold of two parts. When the clay body hardened, the two parts of the head were joined together. In the slip-casting method, begun by about 1860 and widely used by 1890, a liquid clay mixture was poured into a mold and left to harden. Americans imported doll head dolls from about 1840 until the 1930s.
| Material | porcelain | glaze | paint | fabric | Sawdust | hair |
|---|---|
| Origin | Germany |
| Style | China |
| Object ID | 80.1886 |
All artifact images, interpretive information, and website text
© The Strong.
Online Collections by The Strong is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.