There’s something about dolls that draws me to them. I’ve written about plenty of them and often would see them at auction. Not anymore, though.
I suspect that fewer collections are being sold off by owners or by family members who don’t know what else to do with a relative’s 500 dolls. Perhaps, collectors are just holding on to them. I’ve picked up a few African American dolls over the years and I’m keeping them because they are scarce.
At auction recently, I was surprised to see a doll represented not in physical form but in a painting. She looked like one those bisque dolls with neatly coiffed hair and wearing a period dress that looked to be freshly sewn. Most of the antique ones I’d seen in the past wore dresses that had aged as much as the dolls.
I wondered who had painted the watercolor and saw the signature “Joyce R. Smedley ’78” below the eyelet trim on the dress. On the back of the framed painting was a typed label: “‘My Mother’s Doll’ by Joyce R. Smedley. $80.00.”
I figured this was a special drawing by a daughter in honor of her mother, who I presumed loved dolls. Was she a collector? I wondered.
I was just as curious about the artist, so I Googled her name. Smedley, who lived in Lancaster, PA, “was an accomplished artist, bringing beauty into the world through her watercolor and oil painting and most recently through her photography,” her family stated in her obituary in 2013.
She and her husband had spent summers at their vacation home in Maine, and both enjoyed traveling. Her daughter, Janet, is also an artist.
Smedley, it seems, was one of those unknown artists I come across all the time at auction who painted for the love of the craft and as a means of expression.
This was not the first artwork of a doll that I had seen at auction. Some years ago, I came across a sweet print of a little girl who had set up her dolls as an orchestra while she played “Bo Peep” on a Victorian piano.
Titled “The Orchestra,” the print was created by Alice Pauline Schafer, another little-known artist who seems to have made a name for herself in her hometown of Albany, NY, and parts of New England. Schafer also created a similar print of a girl playing a piano for her dolls titled “The Concert (1924),” as well as an etching titled “The Doll Lady” commissioned by the Print Club of Albany in 1961.
One of the most interesting dolls – the real thing – I encountered at auction led me to a female photographer who became famous photographing babies. She eventually produced calendars with photos of a multicultural array of infants, including African American twins.
