I wish I could say I was well travelled but I’m not. We never had the money to venture far afield or even take holidays on a regular basis; I was so used to working that when our mortgage ended and produced some spare cash just in time to take a holiday for our silver wedding anniversary, I took notebooks with me in case I had to interview someone.
My dolls, however, have been all over the world from the very beginning. Initially this was because of Miniatura. Visitors really are very international and always have been so. Although the proximity of the airport facilitates the arrival of overseas visitors (you can get off the plane to stand on the moving pavement for five minutes and there you are) it’s really the calibre of the show that attracts people from all over the world. The hobby is international; to call the best collectors enthusiastic is to considerably understate the lengths they will go to for the item they want. The hobby itself evolved on a basis of bespoke craftsman-made collectables which only serves to sharpen the already heightened collecting instincts of the average miniaturist. As for the exceptional miniaturists, I have heard tales of artists being approached by miniature museum owners with bottomless chequebooks. More than one artist whom I’ve interviewed has seller’s remorse for letting a particularly great piece go. It is art, so artists producing at international collector level are not only prone to producing one-off masterpieces, they actually strive to do so.
All of which attracts an international audience, which means that my dolls are very well travelled. Usually I don’t know where they go, I just meet the buyer briefly and try not to hold people up too much, though I always love to hear about houses and collections. Show visitors have agendas and shopping lists; I’ve been there, done that and do understand. Very occasionally I’ve been sent or given at the show, pictures of my dolls in their new homes which I treasure. Now the wonders of the Internet and the speed and facility of email make it possible to show you this:
which is one of my dolls having a ride on a horse in Australia!
This doll is living in Sydney and was lucky enough to see the New Year’s firework display over the Sydney Harbour bridge; it looks as if she was in place and waiting early.
Huge thanks to Lea-Anne for the pictures; if future collectors send photographs of my little artefacts in far flung places I’ll be happy to show you here because, as we know, it’s a small world.
Talking of collectors, if this is you and you’ve had your eye on something in the shop I should warn you that I will be taking some of the shop stock to Miniatura and will remove it from the virtual shelves in three week’s time. Of course anything unsold will reappear on the virtual shelves after the show together with many new things and, naturally, as I cannot predict what will be collected, I have no idea what will reappear. Also as Miniatura is a miniatures show, none of the big dolls will be going anywhere. If you have been waiting for February’s pay cheque to turn up and have your eye on something small don’t leave it too long.
It’s the same problem as the Min really and the eternal collector’s dilemma, should you get it when you see it or wait in case there is something better later? I can’t advise you except to say the most memorable items in my collection are those I think about regretfully, having failed to acquire them. There are artists long gone whose work I gawped at over a show table and then sat at home and thought about and never even bought a tiny sample of and wish I had. Some of the items were beyond me anyway. There was the kneehole desk with the barley sugar twist legs that sold for £40,000 to a museum and was worth every penny. There was a piano I saw in a shop that had the most incredible mirror finish on it that I wanted to hold just to say I’d held it but the shopkeeper, quite rightly, possibly, wasn’t letting anyone’s mitts on it. There have been people I’ve interviewed whose work, moderately priced, I’ve taken for photography and inexplicably returned with longing glances to their table and never asked to buy and should have done, if I had half a grain of sense. There have been artists making an only-one-ever appearance at a show and I failed to get something.
Avid viewers of the television programme Antiques Roadshow will have noticed over the last season that dolls’ house miniatures, so far mainly furniture, have been appearing as items for the experts to value with increasing frequency. I have known from the start that the items I make will do better financially for future dealers than they will ever do for me. The difficulty of producing original porcelain dolls together with the competition from mass produced dolls and those made by easier methods, ensure that there will always be fewer original porcelain makers, though I know that the survival rate of porcelain will undoubtedly be superior to anything churned out of inferior materials or stuck together with glue. Even I have been surprised at the appearance of relatively modern miniatures in an antique collecting context; I was expecting it to happen but not until much later this century.
It’s a collector’s world. Thanks to the Internet the possibilities are greater than they have ever been before. You can surf the world from your home or your phone and cast your acquisitive eye at your own country or every country in the world. Now that you can virtually roam the planet without ever having to pack a suitcase, who knows what you will find?
If it’s something of mine, and you would like to send pictures as Lea-Anne did, we can all fly around the world together without a plane.
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JaneLaverick.com – tiny carbon footprints.