Collections within My Collection: Josef Originals

First Post of the Day

My very first model horses were chinas, made in Japan chinas. I was six when I got my first one, and was so enchanted that they began accumulating. 

And needless to say, they broke. I played with them. All the time. But my dad would step in and make repairs and I'd soon be cantering them across the wood floors again.

I had Leftons, Shaffords, Clovers, Norcrests, Ucagos, Norleans, and more. 

But I did not have any Josef Originals. I didn't even discover them until I was an adult and my much loved/repaired early china pieces were all carefully wrapped in tissue paper and long put away.

An early California pottery started by Muriel Joseph and Tom George in 1946, the pottery produced horses and other figurines in the United States until the 1960s and then in Korea, Japan, and Taiwan in the 1970s and early 1980s when the pottery was sold to George Good in 1982. (The spelling "Josef" came from a misspelling of Muriel's last name.)

I have three Josef Original pieces, all foals.

In my post about Breyer's cake and candy horses, I mentioned that there are some Hagen Renaker pieces that remind me of candy bars. 

This bay color does the same!

The JOs that I have seen have oversized eyes

and that helps me identify sticker-less ones that I find.

This candy bar colored bay foal has colored slip, a characteristic of many JOs according to articles I have read about them.

All three of my JOs came from a dealer at a Great Lakes Congress show.

They are not sought out by many collectors so generally they can be found for a reasonable price.

But buyer beware - as I did research for this blog post, a lot of the photos of supposed Josef Original pieces were not Josef Originals. They were other Japan brands and they were mislabeled.

An intact label helps, but we all know that labels can (and do) get switched.

If you'd like to see more of them, a Josef Original Gallery can be found here at Jane Chapman's Eagle Ridge Collectibles site. 

I'm not actively seeking any Josef Originals or other Japan chinas, but were I to stumble across more of them, I'd certainly stop and take a look.

Stay 'tooned!

--

Last day to enter the give away! Commenting ends tonight at 11:59 PM Eastern. I'll spin to win Tuesday or Wednesday.

Collection Cleaning and Rearranging: The White Box

Reorganizing your collection means you need boxes or tubs for storing items you are putting away for a while. I knew I had some empty tubs stashed in my hobby closet so I opened the closet doors and began looking for them.

Naturally, they were in the furthest back corner of the closet. As I pulled out tubs and boxes to get to them, I came across a white box. It had several labels on it - Dining Room Horses, Mini Hagen Renakers, Some Large HRs, and Star Wars Books, to name a few. 

Curious, I opened it to see what was really in there.

 (I took photos for file purposes, so they are not the best. But since I found some fun things, I decided to blog about the contents of the white box.)

A trio of Japan sheep.

Some old San Dimas HR unicorns.

They were still on their cards, with one dated 1989

and the other 1995.

A broken carousel horse bell and a Stablemate with wagon and accessories.

How I wish I had left it in its original box - the harness was a mess.

A Sandicast resin Springer puppy, and two more Hagen Renakers on cards.

MORE unicorns and an old Japan cat that had belonged to my mother.

An unusual, unmarked china foal and a Wade zebra.

A recent HR Disney terrier.

Two Springer Spaniels, one on a 1986 card with brown eye whites, the other on an undated card with white ones.

My first HR dog (the Bloodhound) that I found in the 1990s at an antique shop and a Black Lab.

A recent Disney dog.

A glazed foal with the word "foreign" carved in its off hind leg. (Go here to read more about this piece.)

 

 

A very early HR wolf - I bought it a month or so after it was introduced in 1991. Love those yellow eyes!

There was plenty of room left in the box, and since I was also rearranging my china cabinets as well as my plastics, I tucked some chinas into the box for storage, too.

I'd rather they were out and on display, but it has gotten to the point where it's either box some of them up, 

or purchase another china cabinet. I just don't want to do that.

Funny how rearranging the shelves leads to all kinds of sorting, cleaning, and organizing! But I enjoy digging through my boxes and switching things up, so it's not a problem.

And, there were actually a couple of surprises in that white box, things I'd forgotten I had and was thrilled to find. More on those coming up.

Stay 'tooned!

New Circus Ponies!

I found some more circus ponies on eBay. The one on the left is definitely a Hagen Renaker knock-off while the others are made to be part of a set to go with it.

Both the HR knock-off and the rearing horse have broken front legs. I was okay with that since I already have them. The seller was not sure just who the leg belonged to. (It belongs to the HR knock-off.)

These imitations and other set pieces were made by several Japanese companies, including Shiken and Kelvin. (My first one is on the right.)

Sometimes the Japan copies are larger or smaller than the original HRs. These two copies show the difference in size that these ponies can be found in. (I love the copies - I'll try to get all mine out and post photos in the next day or so.)

I bought the set knowing that the two were broken because I wanted this piece.

It is yet another variation in the circus ponies, and I did not have it nor had I seen it before.

But you can see by the color of the body, mane, and tail, and by the gold harness with the red heart that they are clearly copied from Hagen Renaker. The HRs have gold hooves while the copies have black.

From what I can tell from my small collection of the copies, there are three size scales and several companies who produced them. My guess is that they were made in the late 1950s/early 1960s as the HR Head Up and Head Down circus ponies were released in 1955.

I have nine of the Hagen Renaker circus ponies, both the early pieces as well as the 1980s ones with the different colored harnesses. I like them a lot. But I have at least eleven of the imitations and copies, and I find them equally charming.

As Susan Bensema Young told me once, referring to my love of circus ponies, "Really, the restriction of your collection to one subject seems to have resulted in the most amazingly unrestricted explorations imaginable!!"

She's right - who would've thought that a love of circus ponies would lead to so many varied pieces!