B is for Benevolent Buys - 2 of 3

This first shot was a bunch of things from a charity shop in Cranleigh, same visit as the Post Office and includes the deer we've already seen (I should pop over there again, it was a while ago!), while the others are more recent, but a few interesting things?

 

A ceramic cat fairing, I've picked-up so many of these I wonder if I shouldn't do the 'Shire Album'! In point of fact, the 'proper' ones have been done, and most of the ones I've picked-up over the years, are the cheap, unrated/discounted (by the serious/dedicated collectors) copies, or Japanese imports, so that's not a viable idea! I'll do a page here one day!

 

A resin otter and Phidal Marvel or DC character, a capsule-toy dinosaur, distributor obscured, the glass vitrine deer we saw the other day, two teddy bears, one generic, the other from the Noddy set which is slowly growing, along with an inclusion bouncy-ball.

 

That inclusion; it seems to be a cake decoration, with icing spike!

 

Undersides of the two bears, one in plastic and marked 'Noddy Subsidiary, Empire Made' with code and date (no, I can't read them either!), while the generic, probably also a cake decoration is chalkware, made of a plaster composition.

 

 

This was one of those strange moments of serendipity bordering on synergy, I'd seen the [marked] Peter Fagan (which is why I could 'believe' earlier today!) in Blue Cross, and left it as a bit daft, then went next door to the DEBRA shop and found the 'Sitting Pretty' trio from The Leonardo Collection (real high-street jewellers fare from Lesser & Pavey), so, it seemed dafter to not grab the one, and wizz back next-door for the other! Kittens . . . in satchels . . . on the Internet!

 

1987 for the smaller, 1998 for the larger, and I'm guessing, given some cats' love of bags, that this is a common trope among these ornamental 'collectable' sets of cats, so we may find more!

 

This came with one or other of the above purchases, and I don't think it's Jade, but one of the many false Jades which can be marbles, or quartzes/quartzites, maybe a greenish onyx? There is a sub-collection of reptiles in a half-shell, which we haven't really looked-at yet, but one day!

 

And there is another one or two of this type there, as they are always popular tourist mementos (there are elephants too, and we've seen a lizard here, I think), things made of the local stone, are forever anchored in where they came from, if you know what I mean? Much nicer than a poured-resin, puffin, fridge magnet with Camber Sands marker-penned on it!

V is for Voracious Verdite Vertebrate

An alternate title-idea was G is for Great Grey Green Greasy Limpopo River, but - although I can't find it - I think we did have that, many years ago?

 

A bit off the beaten track tonight, but a figural nevertheless, and a rather fine one! I believe it's carved from a form of stone known as Verdite (green-ite?!!), but something called New Zealand Jade can look similar, but should be much harder, this is quite a soft rock I think, not that I am any kind of expert!

Also known variously as Verdite Serpentine or Fuchsite, a group of rocks from Southern Africa, this was probably carved for the tourist trade, in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) by a member of the Shona tribe, and no, I didn't know any of the above until I started googling 'green rock animals' half an hour ago!

 

 

Crocodile rather than alligator, from the backplate and nose shape . . . and . . . Africa! I know you are supposed to know about teeth and stuff to really know what you are looking at, but this is a representative piece, not going for full realism, and as such I think the sculptor has captured it well?

I love it, it is a very characterful animal, with not a small amount of evil about its countenance, as it creeps-up on a wildebeest crossing somewhere on the veldt, waiting for a straggler, or a young fool to cross first!

It had an accident a few years ago, revealing a quite granite-like granularity to the unworked stone, which thankfully soaked up a couple of blobs of superglue and went back together perfectly.

The other thing I like about it, beyond the character of the sculpt, is the colour, or range of colours, which vary from deep olives and duns to flecks of malachite-green. During the resent Googling the last search was 'Verdite Crocodile', revealing this to be one of the better examples, sculpt wise, with modern ones being far more crudely sculpted/finished.

 

And it's about the same size as the late Britains beast (with moving jaw), so we'll probably look at them together with others (the Charbens is similar) one day.

S is for Seen Elsewhere - Torgano Alpini

Bit of a box-ticker this one, I collected an incomplete set of Torgano alpine troops or 'Alpini' a while back, and as the weather was good, I took them outside and shot them in the garden, these shots were the result, and I've shown them elsewhere, so here to tick the box!

54mm semi-flat, or demi-ronde; do you use French for Italian figures? Five of six figures I think, the missing one being a kneeling machine-gunner and the weakest of the sculpts as far as realism is concerned!

The plaque is one of two from our childhood, the other is a squirrel I think, or a badger; I can't remember? But they were obviously bought at a craft fair or some holiday destination as keepsakes, and we had one each hung on the bedroom wall at the ends of our beds - we shared a bedroom until I was sixteen!

Hand-carved sandstone, it originally had a knotted leather bootlace to hang it, but when I found them last year, they are perished brittle with age. Anyone know where they came from? They may have come back from America in '69?

F-UPP is for Follow Up to the Previous Post!

From the "If you're going to mention him in the text you might show them the bloody thing Hugh" department, come not one but two miners, one of which is definitely Australian!

Forgot I had this one (hiding in the 'mocherette' folder with all the Westair, Peltro and Kinder crap), his axe is broken, but a semi-precious stone that size will break most tools! In a copper alloy and 'antiqued' to match all those tourist pencil-sharpeners (probably retailed off the same shelf!), he's digging some interesting stuff - I think the pale one is a piece of Larimar, the dark blue a poor (or low-value) piece of Opal (Sapphire cabochon)?

This is the one I mentioned in the previous post; one has to assume he's from Wales, Scotland (at a pinch) or even Cornwall, but he too could be Australian, from the Ruhr, from the former Czechoslovakia (Ertzgibirge?) or even somewhere more exotic like Chile or South Africa; without a label we'll probably never know, although the stones should be a clue, he's standing on Marble (Italy?) and attacking something which looks to be a bit like unpolished Black Tourmaline or Enstatite?

The coppery one is around 25mm, this one is closer to a war-gaming 28mm and manufactured the same way; whitemetal in cold-cast rubber moulds, although I think the blob of Araldite is a post-retail 'mend'!

H is for How They Come In - They Come Back!

My late Mum was a hoarder, not the daytime schedule/early-evening, TV reality-show, whacko-piles of damp newspaper that eventually kills the occupant in a stairs triggered landslide of old news and sports reports type hoarder, but rather someone who went through the war and it's deprivations, and determined never to throw anything away which might be useful. Consequently the sorting of her estate has been a long, slow process - which is ongoing - and which has thrown-up some interesting stuff, among which was this . . .

. . . I'm not sure if it's an old J&J/Boots fabric-plaster box, or an early Cotton-bud/Q-Tip container, but the contents were momentarily a complete mystery to me (given that she knew I collected this stuff and would pass on the odd bit she did find), until I remembered she had taken a few pieces from my Brother and I, years ago (mid/late-1970's) to try her hand at casting them in silver, using the 'lost-wax' method, but with pre-formed plastics rather than wax sculpts . . . she may have intended to experiment with plaster moulds too, I can't remember.

The reminder of this event was actually a small Britains baby bear (of which I had several in my Ancient Briton army!), which is missing, but I seem to recall both the bear and a small elephant or lion 'not working', so they must have been lost in the 'losing' process?

You can see she took items which might be commercially popular as novelties, Guy the Gorilla was still popular in the national memory, big cats, little cats and pigs are always popular as are rabbits, the highlander was once one of my most prized possessions, like the 'last man standing' Airfix German Paratrooper officer, I had gone to some effort over the painting of him!

There is also the possibility that another incident started the thought process which led to this micro-hoard . . . we were on holiday somewhere, and Mum had made us follow her round some antiques place, you know the sort of thing - with lots of 'kiosks' or bays - and as a reward for our behavior whilst obviously bored, asked us if we'd like to chose something from a cheapie cabinet, I can't recall what my brother chose, but I chose a piglet, landscaped on a plinth; a mini vignette. She then tried to talk me out of it with a disdainful "You don't want that"!, but I was adamant, and the thing was purchased, what she had spotted which I hadn't was that it was a Britains piglet (as above) heavily glossed (black & white) to resemble glazed ceramic, landscaped with Pollyfilla^TM stained with watercolours, on a stack of old coat-buttons, glued together and painted gold! She pointed all this out back at the car, but hadn't wanted to be rude in front of the dealer! I was still happy with it, but the pig soon broke-free of the filler and joined the other animals in the farm tub!

And no - I don't know why there's a Christmas Cracker miniature compass in there with them!

Point of focus was different on the two shots! Highlights include the Britains running rabbit and sitting cat, along with the piglet being fed from the later farm figures' set.

Now . . . I thought I had one of these, but it hasn't turned up in all the sorting and consolidating I've been doing since January, so finding our childhood pair (Mum bought us one each in Fleet Toys, not because we wanted them but because she thought they were dinky!) has been a useful bonus, although one of them has been more chewed than the other; I'll blame my brother as I just don't remember playing with them that much!

This article - on stone animals - has been in the 'long-queue' since 2014 (ignore the given date - it's how I sort stuff in Picasa), and now needs a complete re-shoot, which won't be done for a while yet, but one image was worth pulling-up and adding to this post as it's . . .

. . . another Duck Billed Platypus! Although if you know anything about these critters Duck Billed Dinobeast is more apt, they have a poison spur and a bad temper! But if you are the last/only living species of your entire taxonomic family and genus AND used to be hunted for food by the pink monkeys; you'd be a bit mad.

This one is bronze with 18/22ct gold-leaf on the bill and webbed-claws, the whole soldered/braised (?) to a stone! He's about twice the size of the Britains plastic platypuses, -pusses? Platipii? And must be an upmarket Australian tourist memento thing . . . I have a cheaper miner with pick-axe, in whitemetal, similarly attached to a piece of stone, which might be Antipodean, from the Ruhr or Welsh?

P is for Pyramids

It's aliens in'it? No! It’s the simplest way to build large structures with low technology . . . basically it’s a pile of solidified builder's sand! And; the shape (viewed though half-closed eyes) is the only thing which links the Pyramids of Egypt with the stepped-temples of Mesoamerica, or orgiastic piles of Madhya Pradesh in pre-Mogul India!

I mentioned another parcel from Peter Evans the other day, and I'm not planning it an 'H is for...' as it will mostly get an outing in rack-toy month (RTM - August), although I have taken a birds-eye shot for later, but these two were loose in the parcel, I have no idea where they came from but it must be a play-set toy or activity pack of some kind?

Both a rather bright yellow polyethylene and entirely hollow, posed here with an Atlantic Pharaonic chariot in 1:72nd as the best size guide. Actually Pharaoh has got in the way - they are separate sculpts, not joined at the corners! 16-06-20 - They are from the larger 'Egypt' bucket by K&M under the Wild Republic brand (code 22854).

While I had camera and Egyptians at the same location . . . this one is a polished piece of what I suspect is Portland sandstone, but filled with vegetative detritus rather than the more recognisable fossils you find on Westminster Bridge or the side of the Economist Building; an off-cut in other words, which lent itself to being shaped-up and polished as a pyramidal keepsake!

In comparison with the card one we looked at a while ago, some kids' activity-magazine I picked-up in a charity shop a year or so ago. There is a fourth I could show, but anyone who's seen the Marx Miniature Masterpiece pyramid will know it's too tall, too blunt, too 'square' and too err . . . purple (!) to be included this time, we'll check it out in a MMM-accessory round-up some time!

The figure shots here show the commoner colours of these; from orangey- through tanned- to pale-flesh, but it's worth noting that unless you're a box-completeist, you're always better trying to get your hands on the larger chariot or 'Egyptian Cavalry' sets (1503, 1603 or 2503) as you don't always get all the poses in the smaller box (1803).

And many thanks to Peter for the plastic ones! 

R is for the Real Thing

According to the labels put on it by the seller (some +40-odd years ago), or the collector (I think it was an auction lot) this is a mid-Bronze Age hammer-head. In an axe-like format it was probably used for rough-working wood, for posts, door-frames, cart-parts? That sort of thing; also for post-holes, breaking ground, ditching, digging roots out . . . and chopping dead-wood for firewood? The blunt end would be for banging-in posts or 'nails'; handmade bronze pins, killing livestock and making new hammers!

Other than that I know nothing about it and wouldn't pretend to; when I mentioned it to an archeologist friend of mine (in its absence) I thought it was 'cave man' (i.e. Palaeolithic or Stone Age) and she got quite excited saying "....there's only a few known" but I guess, later metal-age ones are commoner?

Anyway, as part of the occasional ('very occasional' these days, but I hope to have more non-toy stuff go up in the future) 'Other Collectables' thread (which was a separate Blog back at the start of my web-logging), I'll let the pictures speak for themselves, the interesting thing is the double tapered hole which would produce a pinch-point, allowing another hammering-tool or a block of wood, to force it on to a slightly larger-diameter shaft and to then pack the ends with waxed or pitched-rope maybe, before the/any wedges and cross-tying?

I don't know what kind of stone it is either, but you can see it's a fine-grained material, and appears to be a sedimentary rock similar to slate or shale, however from the chip off the 'blade' end you can see the granular look and stepped-edge of something more like a fine granite? It's also bloody heavy!

E is for Exquisite Emperor

As well as the twelve tazze we looked at yesterday, Brian also sent a couple of shots of this, which I far prefer, despite the Met's website being slightly dismissive of the likely (it's not 100% clear or known) maker, Reinhold Vasters of Aachen, Germany.

To quote the Met's website description in full;

"This Silver Caesars-inspired statuette was probably made by Reinhold Vasters, a nineteenth-century goldsmith famous for his forgeries of Renaissance objects. Vasters evidently admired the tazze - his personal collection included copies of the Augustus and Vitellius dishes. It is likely that he also manufactured the six replacement feet added to the tazze in the late nineteenth century."

Made of finely carved marbles and other semi-precious stone, the joins (which I suspect - with no evidence - are peg-and-hole with grout) hidden by finely wrought, gilded, silver-work, which - as well as hiding the joins - will also hold the pieces in place., flush against each other?

I'm not so convinced that this is necessarily inspired by the twelve Caesars as just a wider part of the Enlightenment's look back at the Renaissance's own referring back to the splendor of Rome (and Greece) as it was seen by the 'modern' men of those ages, where the monumental statuary was the 'big puller'.

A few samples of marble similar to those used on the Caesar, including the green and red stone which I believe is called blood-stone, as used on his kilt, a fine Calcutta/caramel-yellow (onyx?) similar to, but paler than the sample his breast-plate is carved from, the cherry-yogurt pink comes in various hues, our little marble having large flecks of black in it (probably another version of Bloodstone), while the statuette's own shirt-sleeves and cloak are flecked with paler grey splotches; the plinth pink having white flecks and striations.

Note also that the decorative fringe of his belt was once fully enamelled in a rich, translucent apple-green, now mostly flaked-away.

I couldn't find a green to match the main-body of the plinth, it looks like the same stuff they cut signet-rings and seals from (they also used bloodstone, but tended to use purer-red pieces for small works) while the boots seem to be the same near-all-black as the black in the above group, infused with white, fern-like fronds or 'ice-crystals', you also get streaks or spots; his left boot has one running across the front of the ankle, and it's not far-removed from the Carrara we were looking at a year ago - but it's not an exact science; they will all be Italian stones though.

Link

Metropolitain Museum of Art - from the other side

The exhibition has been made possible by The Schroder Foundation, Selim K. Zilkha, the Anna-Maria & Stephen Kellen Foundation, Nina von Maltzahn, and an anonymous donor.

I'm very grateful to Brian for sending us these, it's nice to have a bit of up-market content on the blog, and to see what we might be adding to the collection after we crack that all-important 'becoming a multi-millionaire' ceiling!

N is for Nature and Gnome's Stools!

Mixing the 'small scales' here with little animals, small plants and small plastic plants, it's a sort of 'News, Views - Bits & Bobs' with a ragged thread running through it!

I shot these over a few days at the cusp of the months just gone and just arrived, I'm sure they are Ink Caps (Coprinus), but which one (there are a dozen or more) is not so clear, my bible for such things (Philips - of course!) doesn't have a perfect match, these (in the pictures) being a bit small for the 'standard' Shaggy Ink Cap (Lawyer's Wig), but a bit big for the Coprinus Lagopus they otherwise more closely resembled.

The detritus left in the third shots is what you can make the ink out of and which gives them their common-name, except you should harvest it before it gets to the state shown here!

Apropos the Wade / Not-Quite-But-Probably-Irish-Factory-Wade Leprechauns we saw the other day, Peter Evans sent me this a couple of days later and I was saving it for the actual 'News Views' but thought this was an ideal way to mix toys and naturalism!

Those of you with a good eye will have realised - immediately upon seeing the above - that what I wrote the other day was a load of cobblers, he wasn't carving a boat OR a crib . . . he's a shoemaker!

He's plastic and not sitting on an Ink Cap, but rather a Fly Agaric, or at least a hand-painter's idea of a Fly Agaric! And there are shade's of Fontanini in the Carrara'esque sample of Connemara marble beneath the Fly Agaric!

A distant relative (by time rather than blood) used to breed Connemara Greys for the London taxi trade and is known in the family for his pronouncement in the 1900's that petrol engines were noisy and smelly and would never take-off! He (and the taxi trade) lost his horses to the hell of Flanders and as the Western Allies grabbed large chunks of the former Ottoman Empire with its cheap oil (throwing electric vehicles on the scrap-heap for three generations), he chose to retire

Sadly although not distant by blood; he's far enough away for me to be unable to apply for Irish Citizenship - so I'm pinning my hopes on the Tories wreaking Bwreakxit!

Shades of Tintin!

This is meant to be a Fly Agaric too, it's a Hong Kong (branded to a 'KT') plastic cake-decoration version of a Japanese cast-lead miniature garden ornament, the lead versions themselves replacing the even earlier ceramic/pumice ones. It's posed in an apple I rescued from three Hornets . . .

26th September 2017

. . . these three Hornets! Note the nervous beating a retreat . . . twice! I'd chopped a few of the rotten apples up with the mower and they were emanating a cider-smell from the top of the compost-bin!

24th September 2013

They get so drunk on apples at this time of year they can't fly! This chap (probably a barren chap'ess!) fell of the woodpile several times before I started filming and went on to make several more attempts, getting caught in the spider's web again too!

Like human drunks struggling to make their legs walk in a straight-line, it just couldn't get its wings to work properly, buzzing furiously, it was going nowhere, flight-wise!

J is Just for Fun!

How small is the Smallscaleworld?

Well, we can make it 10-pixels-by-ten-pixels and using an external hard drive could put up to what . . . twenty terabytes . . . fifty terabytes in the single folder? I've got about 45-50 gigabytes at the moment, but a lot of that is 9 years-worth of blog images!

We can of course reduce the title considerably, and throw the folder into space to make it look even smaller! But the Icon is now 18x18 pixels . . . it's grown - Doh!

Ooh, what's this tool here? . . . OK, 9 pixels by 9 pixels; that's better!

Let's reduce the folder title to the minimum and camouflage it!

In fact, why bother with a title? Let's just point at it; now it's hard to see! That's about as small as I could make the Smallscaleworld without Microsoft coming up with new icons!

Or . . .

. . . we can go the Fontanini route and decide the Smallscaleword's over 800mm! Yes, that's nearly a meter!

Of which -  two inches are the base-lump of Italian Carrara marble which caused the behemoth of a figure to come into being. I shot these at the PW show a couple of years ago, it's some show wot 'appens sometimes, don't know when the next one is - probably missed it!

Sold as mantle-pairs, there were 8 sculpts (and a pair of mounted figures with lovely relaxed horses) in the smaller sizes (Fontanini produced these in many sizes from 60mm upwards and many finishes), but I don't know if more than one pair were pantographed-up to this size. You can see some of the 8-inch figures bottom left in the shot.

The Carrara marble gift shops had/have tons of this stuff, and the bases utilised the 'flawed' marble off-cuts, the prime building-material and/or sculpting marble being prized for its pale grey hews; polishing to a lightly striated white, not the dark grey with white bacon-streaks (marbeling!) of most of the bases you find on the Fontanini-supplied figurines.

There is a single figure of the right-hand pose on Etsy at the moment for 103-quid (an odd number, but presumably dollars-into-pounds? I didn't study it too closely!) which is as much as you'd want to pay for a Capodimonte porcelain one, but to be honest, if you keep an eye on charity shops or local auction houses, you can pick these up for £15/20, or only a few quid for the smaller ones; I recently picked-up a couple of the Rococo 'gentry' for 6-quid the pair, and saw a set of six of the chinoisery figures for a pony*!

* That's £25 for the overseas readers . . . £20 is a score, a monkey is £500 and a donkey is a dog is a lemon is a shed is an old car!