Another Kind of Hobby Horse

The term "hobby horse" has a number of meanings.  It is most commonly used to refer to a stick horse, a kind of antique toy still in use today consisting of a horse head shape on the top of a long stick that a child can straddle and pretend to ride while trotting around on his or her own two feet.  Its second most popular meaning refers to a person's pet topic or area of concern -- something that someone is willing to talk about and/or argue over at a moment's notice.

Model horse collectors once had access to a magazine called The Hobby Horse News that featured interesting articles on all aspects of collecting and showing model horses.  Its logo was a rocking horse, which is also sometimes referred to as a "hobby horse".

Since collecting, customizing, and showing model horses is, in fact, a hobby, all of our little horse figurines might quite properly be called our hobby horses.  But clinky collectors in particular use the term "hobby horse" to indicate a ceramic horse made from a plaster mold sold by a specific supplier to be used by home handicrafters of ceramics.

Hobby mold horses can be stunningly beautiful or simple horse-shaped objects, depending on the skills and intentions of their decorators.  The horses shapes themselves are usually proprietary -- owned by the company that produces the molds -- but some of them are copies of horses originally produced by other companies, like Breyer, Beswick, Hartland, and Hagen-Renaker.  The copies I've seen have never been close enough to the originals, though, to be confused for them by someone who knows what to look for in the real thing.

I have three of these hobby horses in my collection -- actually five if you count my two Silly Horses from Jessica Fry's J's Critters workshop, but I just count them as decorations rather than as members of my hobby herd.

Two of the hobby horses I have were painted by friends of mine.  The third is one I picked up in a deal that resulted from following up an ad on Kijiji.

Holland Arabian

My first is an Arabian-type horse painted by a former co-worker who was a ceramic artist in her spare time.  When she found out that I collected horses she generously offered to paint a couple for auction prizes for a live show I was hosting at the time.  To thank her for her donation, I bought one of her horses myself.  It's a Holland Ceramics mold, painted a lovely soft buttermilk dun.

Levade Hunter

My second hobby horse is a Levade Ceramics hunter mold, finished in pastels by one of my first model horse friends.  She, too, does ceramics as a hobby and offered to do one for me.  Pastel work is something way outside of my comfort zone, so I'm quite impressed by the quality of the color of this piece.

White Horse Drafter

My last hobby horse is the Kijiji one.  How I got him is a complicated story, but basically what happened is that I found a Beswick horse for sale on Kijiji that was being offered at a price I thought was too good to pass up.  Before I contacted the seller I decided to look at what else she might be selling, just in case she was liquidizing a collection or something like that.  It turned out that she did have one other horse for sale, a draft horse I'd never seen before.  Unable to meet with the seller myself, I dispatched my brother to go and pick up the Beswick for me, and to see if he could get some kind of a deal if he took the drafter too.  He did just that, and so both horses joined me temporarily in my home.

I actually bought them both with the idea of selling them on as the lack of real estate in my china cabinet just didn't allow me to keep them both.  The Beswick did sell quite quickly, but I've had no nibbles of interest on the drafter.  I have, however, discovered what it is -- a White Horse Ceramics drafter mold.

It's so big that it doesn't fit in my china cabinet, but it's big enough and solid enough to stand rather securely on an open shelf.  It's one of those horses that I look at every day as it stands beside the television in my living room, and looking after it day after day I find myself speculating on how it came to be.

The seller herself was apparently not the artist.  When she sold it to my brother she thought maybe it was one of those English china draft horses you often see hitched to dray wagons -- usually made by Melba Ware.  She also thought it might have originally been one of a pair, although she was sure she didn't have another one in her home.

It's very delicately painted.  There are a couple of areas where the paint obviously bubbled and popped in the kiln, leaving bare round spots in the finish.  But the paint work is quite lovely, with very natural shading and blending between the honey bay coat and the white markings.  The eyes in particular intrigue me -- they're of the top line and dot variety that you most often see on Made In Japan horses.  What kind of a painter, I wonder, would paint such a delicate coat and yet go for such simple eyes?  Was the person copying a Made in Japan model, or perhaps trying to mimic a Hagen-Renaker horse look (since some H-R minis also have these simple eyes)?  Or was this a ceramic artist who painted eyes like these on everything with eyeballs?

The mystery of it has made this particular hobby horse grow on me.  With all my other hobby horses, I know who painted them and why.  This large drafter is something of a refugee from parts unknown, but now, having crossed my threshold, he's beginning to look more and more like he's here to stay.