Gallery of Portrait Dolls


My dolls and I were very fortunate to have been featured in Dolls in Miniature the magazine Spring 1995. Please click here if you would like to read the article.


Marie was exhibited at the Museum of Civilization in Hull, Quebec in "Timeless Treasures: The Story of Dolls" The exhibit features 400 Canadian Dolls. They include beautiful and rare antiques and 46 original doll artist dolls. The exhibit was on for three years and continued until October 1, 2003. She is 5.5" tall. I sculpted her from the antique photo above. I do not know who she was but thought she had such a lovely serene expression. She is dressed in a simple dark brown silk dress. I imagined her as a painter so I included two of my miniature watercolors of young girls with their dolls in the exhibit with Marie. If you are interested in more information about this exhibit.. http://www.civilization.ca/hist/dolls/doint01e.html

The faces are sculpted using my original head molds, sculpting directly into the damp porcelain using a very fine paint brush to add and remove wet porcelain. I often use commercial or reproduction molds for the arms and legs. The parts are then fired to a very high temperature. The fired pieces are chinapainted about six times with six more fireings after which time doll parts are added to bodies, wigged and dressed.



The amazing thing about these dolls above was that I was given about ten photos to work from and wasn't sure if they ever wore navy or lace. I wasn't shown the photo on the left until I delivered the dolls. It was such a surprise to see them dressed almost identically to how I dressed them!!! Apparently the youngest usually wears red but her mother was wearing pink for the photo so she was dressed in white and navy too.

Babies