Clinky Crowd Pleasers

Most of the china horses that clinky collectors cherish come from hobby-oriented manufacturers like The Pour Horse, Horsing Around, Animal Artistry, Lakeshore, and others.  Possibly some of the most coveted are those that come directly from the studio of a hobby artist: Candace Liddy, Lynn Frayley, Adalee Valasquez Hude, Karen Gerhardt and others.  Collectors love these pieces because they are made with the collector in mind, and are usually produced as very limited production runs.

Then there are horses produced for well-heeled collectors, like Royal Worcesters, Royal Copenhagen, and Augarten Wein pieces.  Such pieces are not specifically aimed at the collector, but rather for the fan of the fine arts.  Collectors are attracted to the status of owning such creations, as well as to their beauty.

However, many mass market clinkies have a hold of collectors' hearts as well.  Hagen-Renaker's delicate ceramics go for big bucks on the secondary market, as do the older and rarer Beswick and Royal Doulton horses.

Perhaps the most affordable of the mass market chinas, because so many were produced, are the horses of The Franklin Mint, many of whom were sculpted by Pamela du Boulay.

Pamela du Boulay is an interesting model horse sculptor.  I wasn't able to find too much biographical information about her, but what does seem clear is that she started out doing latex Rydal model horses before transitioning through resin (her Horse with the Golden Saddle started life as a resin) to bronzes and the mass market chinas she created for The Franklin Mint.

The reason Ms. du Boulay's china sculptures are so reasonably priced these days may be directly related to the fact that they were produced for The Franklin Mint.  The Franklin Mint bills itself as a manufacturer of collectibles, but the very fact that its items are widely advertised and just as widely distributed, makes them anything but rare.  In fact, as is the case with every kind of collectible, any item manufactured specifically to be collectible, isn't.  Objects become desired collectibles once they are discovered to be rare, or to have been disposed of in large numbers while they were still relatively new (like all those lost childhood comic books and baseball cards, or tin toys tossed into wartime supply drives).  Coveted collectibles become so largely by accident, not by design.

So Pamela du Boulay's Franklin Mint horses were created for the crowd, not for the connoisseur.  Her smaller horses -- from the Noble Horse collection -- were even originally sold with their own curio shelf, ready for filling.  Her larger pieces were primarily sculptures of famous horses of film and literature: Black Beauty (with and without Merrylegs), My Friend Flicka, The Red Pony, Misty of Chincoteague, Fury, Silver, San Domingo, and the King of the Wind.  However, one of her most beautiful pieces was a pair of horses simply titled Racing the Wind, unrelated to any literary or pictorial antecedent.

All of the Franklin Mint horses have china bases, and sometimes the bases are a bit distracting --  when used to prop up a rearing or a running sculpture, for example, the horse's legs tend to get lost in the scenery.  This can be troubling to model horse collectors who are always looking for great conformation, but can be seen as a bonus for the casual consumer because the built up bases help to protect delicate legs from breakage.

As with all equine artists, Pamela du Boulay has a signature style.  Her horses tend to have a very Arab-y look to them -- with delicate bones and chiseled faces.  Where she has had to tamp down this style, as in the Noble Horse series, her sculptures tend toward a certain gawkiness in all but a few cases.  Next to Arabian-type horses, her most successful sculptures are her Lipizzaners, which she also manufactured for The Franklin Mint.

If you look on the bottom shelf you can see my Franklin Mint Red Pony, Flicka, Misty and Lipizzan

I don't like all of Pamela du Boulay's horses equally, but those that I do like, I love.  I've bought and sold a few of the Noble Horse sculptures in my time, though my issues with those had more to do with their paint jobs than with the sculptures themselves.  Among the larger horses, I've had the opportunity from time to time to purchase items like Black Beauty and Fury at very reasonable prices, but have rejected each because I felt that the bases ruined the overall look of the sculptures.

But I still have Flicka, Misty, the Red Pony, and the Noble Horse Lipizzan on my shelves, and I would be loath to part with any one of them.  Misty and the Lipizzan represent, in my opinion, two of du Boulay's more successful attempts to take the Arab out of the horse.  And while the "real" Flicka and Red Pony (Gabilan) were both ranch horses without any suggestion of Arabian blood in their respective books, on my shelves the two are part-breds, with plenty of Arab in the pedigree.

I remember, when I was younger, looking longingly at all The Franklin Mint ads in my mom's Reader's Digest, Woman's Day, Chatelaine, and Family Circle magazines.  Back then they seemed an unaffordable luxury, but now I've been able to purchase some of my favourites at bargain basement prices.  That's the plus side to coveting "collectibles" that don't hold their value -- you might not be able to afford them when you first find them, but sooner or later they might just come down to find you.