I inherited a weird little curio from my Grandmother. I don’t remember ever seeing it in her house, though it could’ve been hidden amongst her enormous collection of salt and pepper shakers. Any time I look at it, even now that it has lived in my house for so long, I am overwhelmed with questions. My grandmother’s house had porcelain figures of children being held up by the giant hand of Jesus, it had kitchen prayers and little plaques with owls made from shells that said ‘world’s best grandmother.’ This figure of a small person with bee wings and a halo, playing flute seems weirdly incongruous. Is it meant to be an angel? And why does the cow have a halo too?
Perhaps, I thought, it was just a product of its time that made sense to whomever brought it to my grandmother’s house. But then, I wanted to find similarly odd figurines of the mid century. I often surf around eBay looking at anything tagged as ‘mid century,’ so this time, I dedicated my search to finding these figurines. Far from the popular brutalist style of the time and equally far from the ‘modern’ ideal that most comes to mind, these figures are weird, fantastical, and kitschy. This is what I found:
While gold accents like the ones on my little cow seemed fairly common on the polk-a-dot pixie, porcelain cat, and purple cow, I was surprised about the rhinestones. Unfortunately the rhinestones seemed the worse for ware on both the grey kitty and purple cow. The snail is obviously pushing the limits of my mid century time frame but I had to include it because it’s just so happy looking. And, I don’t know how the first one is supposed to be a sheep. It seems more like a bear to me, but no bear I know sports a coat quite like that.
None of them really inspires the questions that my little cow riding fairy playing a flute does, but they all do inspire another look. I imagine these little figures are the predecessors of the dollar store ceramics that I grew up with. Produced to fulfill a niche of shoppers and wallets, and perhaps not meant to survive very long.