No. 27

Elisa (Parian)

Antique Parian Reproduction

Details

Artist

Lynn Harrison

Mold

Seeley's

Original

German parian shoulder head, 1860s-1870s

About this doll

'Elisa' is a parian doll in a pale green satin gown trimmed with black beads, with reddish molded hair and earrings. Lynn Harrison made her from a Seeley's mold as a reproduction of an antique.

Unlike a doll with a wig, a parian doll has its hair modeled in the porcelain itself and painted, its most distinctive feature.

Background

'Parian' is the collectors' term for shoulder-head dolls of untinted white bisque made mainly in Germany from about 1860 to 1880. The name comes from the white marble of the Greek island of Paros, and the heads were mounted on cloth bodies. Elaborately modeled hairstyles were often molded together with feathers, flowers, ribbons and gold-lustre combs and earrings, and the eyes were either painted or glass.

The hairstyle dates the doll: a center parting with a hairnet in the early 1860s, and from the late 1860s to the mid-1870s hair piled high on the crown in braids and rolls. The leading makers were Alt, Beck & Gottschalck, Kling, and Dornheim, Koch & Fischer.

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