New to Windsong: Blackhome Grandeur Lyn

 Once in a while I check Facebook Marketplace - I'm a little leery of meeting a stranger and exchanging money for a model, so it's not a way I like to buy. But when this big boy popped up in my feed, I made an exception.

#1206, 2003 - 2004, $40, Facebook Marketplace, from a graduating Purdue senior.

Blackhome Grandeur Lyn (I want to add another "n" to that name!) was made 2003 - 2004 on the vintage Belgian mold and the seller was right here in West Lafayette.

We talked a bit about the models she had for sale which gave me time to check her profile out on Facebook. She wasn't on any hobby sites, but she was on a lot of horse sites and seemed legitimate. I made an offer and arranged to meet her in a busy public park just a few miles from my home.

We made the exchange and home with me he came. 

He's been standing on my "where am I going to put these?" shelf ever since. As soon as I get started cleaning and rearranging the drafters in my collection, he will be displayed with the rest of my Belgians.

Just for fun, I did a little research on the real Blackhome Grandeur Lyn(n). With a name like that, I knew it had to be a portrait model, even though I do not remember hearing much about him at the time.

Here he is in the Breyer 2003 catalog.

I did find a pedigree chart on allbreedpedigree.com, but that was it - the rest of the links were the Breyer models of the horse.

I'm making progress on cleaning and reorganizing the collection, but I don't think I will get to the drafters today. My first goal is to get all the longer models (Huckleberry Bey, Dundee, American Saddlebred, etc.) into the library  my sewing room  the second model horse room and settled safely on the shelves in there.

It is a very long process, but it's coming along and I am already pleased with the results.

Smoke Belgian

This big, ol' "bubble butt" Belgian came from Sande Schneider at Happy Trails 2.

 Smoke Belgian, $92, 1964 - 1971, $40, Sande Schneider, Happy Trails 2, 6/2019.

He's another one that is in great shape for his age!

Gift of a Ucago Belgian (and More!)

Shannon Rodgers (Sterling, IL) gifted me with they lovely Ucago Belgian at Happy Trails.

 Usage Belgian, numer unknown, date unknown, gift from Shannon Rodgers, Sterling, IL, 6/2019.

 She is absolutely mint - someone has cared for her over the past forty or fifty years!

She has some crazing that shows her age, too.

I love her (she even has the old "arrowhead" blaze as Leslie and I used to call it) and she's going into my china hutch.

Shannon also brought little gift boxes for everyone. Such a thoughtful thing to do!

Red Roan Belgian

While the Belgian is not my favorite, it is a vintage mold, and when it's painted in the old red roan colorway...  Well, look who came home with me!

 Breyer Belgian, red roan, no number, 1984 Special Run for Horses International, $100, 1/2019, Julie Acer, Olive Branch, MS

 Red roan is one of my favorite vintage colors and he looks great in it!

Chalky Belgian?

Chalky models are hot, hot, hot in the hobby right now. A chalky is a model which was painted over in white paint and then had another color put over that, or a model which was done in an unusually colored plastic that affects the final color of the piece. Most are from the 1970s and 1980s, but they can be found across the history of the company. (See post after this for a more thorough definition.)

Years ago, Karen Lebeda Beeson told me she thought my Belgian might be a chalky. Ever since, I have tried to determine for certain if he is or not.

Here's a chalky Belgian that another person owns for comparison.

 The mane and the white socks are the give away on it.

Now, here's  my Belgian.

 Mine has a similar mane.

 This picture isn't the best, but that hind leg in the back looks distinctly chalky to me.

Here's a better shot.

There are some hobbyists who turn up their noses and say, "If you have to ask, then it's NOT a chalky!" implying that chalkies are obvious and unmistakeable. But that's not necessarily true, and some of those same hobbyists post pictures on Blab asking if particular pieces are chalky or not.

So, I think it's safe to say that chalkies are NOT always obvious, even if you have seen many and know what they should look like.

I am really leaning toward designating this big guy as a chalky.

Levi - Vintage Collectors' Club 2014

Levi is the first piece for the 2014 Vintage Collectors' Club and he is a keeper!!

 Levi, #712102HD, Vintage Collector Club #1 2014, 1/2014, $135

 I think he is gorgeous.

 And possibly a chalky.

 Love his pink nose.

And Breyer has brought back the vintage boxes this year!!

Insert Sheets

(From Breyer History Diva, Mach 2011)

Back to the Insert Sheets discussion. First, here are some scans of the little seen 1964 Inserts:




I really like the way these pages are designed; if I had the money-time-inclination, I’d have them blown up to one-sheet poster size and frame them for my office. (Note to the folks at Reeves, if you’re reading: you might want to look into this idea. I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who’d be into that sort of thing.)

You’ll note that unlike the 1963 Dealer’s Catalog, these sheets are not full-color. The 1963 Catalog was a bit of an outlier; most of Breyer’s marketing materials prior to the late 1960s were not printed in full-color. It wasn’t purely an aesthetic choice: full-color printing was expensive. If they could get away with printing something in a duotone, or with a spot color or two, they would.

A restricted color palette isn’t that big a deal, as long as the materials themselves are designed and rendered well. And for the most part, they were, but that’s another topic I haven’t even begun to research yet. (I met Richard Lewis once, in passing, about 10-12 years ago. Another one of those "wish I had a time machine for a do-over" moments.)

As far as I know, the 1962 Insert Sheets haven’t shown up - yet. Now there’s something I’d pay an almost-crazy amount of money for. It’s possible they may not even exist, but we didn’t know the 1961 Sheets existed, until they resurfaced.

We’ve got a good idea of which molds those sheets might feature - the Running Mare and Foal, the Western Prancing Horse, and maybe the Texas Longhorn Bull - but having those sheets would prove it, definitively. I’d be fine with finding that information via other routes, but the sheets themselves would be sweet.

Smoke Belgians

(From Breyer History Diva, June, 2011)

Anyway, here is a picture of one of the Smoke Belgians I picked up in one of those large collections I purchased recently:

Yes, he has a chipped ear. Believe it or not, he was the better of the two Smoke Belgians I had to choose from.

Condition is one of the primary criteria in Collectibility judging, but it is not necessarily the most important. The other Belgian was completely intact, but he just wasn’t as … nice. The masking wasn’t quite as clean, he had a few dings, and his shading wasn’t as soft and velvety as this one. Oh, he’s a good piece - but this guy was just seemed a little bit better. Even with a chipped ear.

The Smoke Belgian is another one of those models that seems to elude my grasp. It’s not that he’s that rare - he ran from 1964 through 1971, a decent length of time - it’s that condition has always been an issue. Every single one I’ve found had something wrong with him. Not just a ding or two, but stains, cracks, chips, seam splits - the whole litany of disqualifiers.

So this collection came with two Smoke Belgians, and I was pretty excited about the possibility of finding My Smoke Belgian between the two. What sealed the deal, I think, was when the seller gestured to the two of them and mentioned that he was one of her favorites.

"His name was Chester," she said. Dang it, he had a name. I had to keep him. I mean, keep one: she didn’t specifically point out which one of the two was her childhood equine squeeze, so I had the luxury of choosing who got to be Chester.

Initially I thought the intact one was going to be him - chipped ears are usually an automatic out when it comes to collecting - but once I got the two of them home, and cleaned up, it wasn’t so easy a decision.

I finally went with the one I "liked" better, because of all things that go into defining Collectibility, none of that matters if you don’t "like" a model to begin with.

Dapple Grey History, Part 1

(From Breyer History Diva, 2010)


So, did you hear about the 2010 Mid-States Horse? Yeah, I know, the 2009 was just out a few months ago - apparently someone’s boss on Blab took a pic of the 2010 model at the Mid-States Hardware show; here’s a link to the discussion if you missed it:

http://www.modelhorseblab.com/forums/showthread.php?t=100312

If you don’t want to click for whatever reason - it’s in an open access section of the forum, BTW - it’s a Gray Appaloosa Foundation Stallion named Thunderbolt.

He isn’t like the Gray Appaloosa Foundation Stallion I wrote about a few weeks ago. (Just another creepy coincidence; if I were shilling for Reeves, I think I'd have seen a check, or boxes of horses by now. And I haven't.) This guy is gussied up with splash spots, extra shading, Indian markings and resist underdappling.

"Underdappling" is a term I use to describe dappling that’s underneath another layer of paint. "Resist" is the term generally used hobby-wide to describe the earlier, pre-airbrush style of dappling, where a type of grease was splashed on the model before painting. The dapples were created when the grease was washed off.

Thunderbolt is very appealing, but whether or not I’m actually getting him will depend on how my space situation finally plays out. And it doesn’t look like that extra space I had hoped for will be materializing. The remodel is about 75% done, and most of my stuff is back to where it should be. Except where it doesn’t fit. And what doesn’t fit includes about 50 models.

Major culling will be necessary. I am not looking forward to it.

Did you know that the full-body resist Dapple Gray paint job (aka "Wild Dapple Gray") was a relative latecomer in the Breyer world? It wasn’t until 1964 that we see the appearance of the true Dapple Gray paint job. That’s right, the dappled Decorator colors of Florentine (gold) and Copenhagen (blue) actually premiered before the more "realistic" Dapple Gray. While the Decorator experiment might not have been a success, initially, it did apparently lead to something that was.

Yes, I know, Running Mare and Foal came out in a color called "Dark Dapple Gray" ca. 1962. But it appears that Breyer considered that particular colorway separate and distinct from the "Dapple Gray" of the Belgian and his descendants. Except for the occasional color variation, and some pieces from very late in their run, the Mare and Foal retained their dappling pattern - and their unique color appellation - until they were discontinued in 1973. (I don’t quite know how to classify the Nebraska SRs in all this; they’re definitely "Wild" Dapple Grays, but I don’t know the precise color description they were sold under.)

The Dapple Gray Belgian was discontinued rather quickly - by the end of 1966 - but his color was carried forward on Old Timer, who also debuted in 1966. The color was scarce until the early 1970s, when yet another variation of the Dapple Gray paint job debuted.

That discussion I will leave for my next post. But here’s a sneak preview of the model at the center of that discussion: Marney Walerius’s "In-A-Tiff."

Dapple Grey History, Part 2

(From Breyer History Diva, 2010)


Of course, the morning after I published the last post, I came to the realization that I completely forgot about the Dapple Gray Clydesdale. (I was a bit under the weather at that time; must have been the cough syrup.) Fortunately, I still think most of my observations hold, and that the Decorators were a greater influence on the style of Dapple Gray paint jobs that came to dominate the rest of the decade.

The early Dapple Gray Clydesdales tended to be more roany, and more sedate - two terms that could rarely be applied to the Dapple Gray Belgian or Old Timer. And when hobbyists describe their favorite old-fashioned colors, the Gloss Dapple Grays of their dreams tend to be the ones on the wild side. And Reeves seems to agree:


(Yes, the photo is dreadful. Still working from scans here, folks.)

As promised, here’s the story of In-A-Tiff, in Marney’s own words (mostly.) From an article in the August 5, 1979 Chicago Tribune, "Model horses are center ring as a hobby," written by Mary Daniels:

Still another favorite in her "barn" is a very dark dapple gray Arab, In-A-Tiff. "He’s special because I made a suggestion to Breyer Moulding, and they did something about it. In 1970 I wrote Breyer and complained about the models being made." She felt they were not as authentic or as exciting as they could be.

Peter Stone himself says the earlier Breyer models were "not very emotional at all. They had four legs, were very straight, were a Western-type ho[r]se. There’s been a great deal of sophistication since then."

"They asked me to come down," continues Walerius, "I went into the factories and talked to the designers and the artists. In-A-Tiff came out of that visit, and he became the forerunner for the current dapple gray Arab they use."

(Neat, eh? Lots of good information in this article, especially about the early days; I’ll have to shoot a copy of it over to the folks at the Hobby History web site sometime soon.)

There were a couple of things that made In-A-Tiff’s dappled paint job different from the ones that came before. First, he was matte; with a few notable exceptions - including the Dapple Grey Old Timer, and "Dark Dapple Gray" Running Mare and Foal - most of the Breyer line had already made the switch to the Matte Finish. Second, he had additional shading: dorsal striping, facial detailing, and dark shoulders and hindquarters.

While not as realistic as today’s Dapple Grays, In-A-Tiff’s paint job was a significant step forward. And a popular one, too. In the 1970s, it seemed like Breyer dappled everything: the Proud Arabian Family, the bell-bottom Shire, the SR Clydesdale Family, the SR Belgian, the Classic Andalusian Family Mare, the Stablemate Saddlebred and Arabians …

There was no consistency to these paint jobs, however. Some of the earliest of the new Dapple Grays came with the full complement of new features, and others didn’t. Some had fine lacy dappling, while others had the infamous giant "cornflake" spots. Others had conservative patterns with minimal dappling on their heads and necks, and other had dappling on every square inch of their bodies - including their manes, tails and eyeballs!

I guess it all depended on the mood of the painting department that day. By the end of the 1970s, though, most Dapple Grays had reverted to a slightly toned down, matte to semi-gloss version of the wilder Dapple Grays of yore.

After that, it’s hard for me to make generalizations, because I haven’t done the research yet. And you can see what happens when I get a little lazy with the research. So my history of the Dapple Gray paint job will have to end here, for now.

Gold Ribbon Belgian

(From Breyer History Diva, 2010)

Sometimes I think some hobbyists get a little bit too carried away with the concept of variations. Remember when those slightly semi-gloss, slightly-nicer-than-average Smarty Jones models were found in Grab Bags last year? The fuss was all out of proportion to the amount of variation, I thought.

Yeah, some of them were pretty sweet, but they were also within the range of normal variation for any average, regular-run model. It wasn’t something intentional or planned. A little scouting or judicious handpicking through your favorite dealer could have netted you a model just like it, or better, without the begging on MHSP or the mess of unloading the rest of your Grab Bag.

On the flip side, there are many models that are ignored or undervalued because their subtle differences from the norm - or from similar runs - are missed completely. An excellent example of this is a permanent resident of my office, this SR Dapple Gray Belgian:


Can you see what makes him special, rare and different from the half-dozen other Dapple Gray SR Belgians? It’s not the powder-matte finish, the sparse dappling, or the black mane and tail.

The tail ribbon is painted metallic gold.


He’s the rarely seen - or shall we say, rarely recognized - special run from Eighmey’s Wagon Shop in Waterloo, Iowa, released in 1986. Not many were made - my guess would be in the 150-200 piece range, similar to the equally hard to find Palomino and Dark Palomino SRs from roughly the same time period.

He’s very similar to another SR Belgian released a short time later - through a number of mail order dealers, mostly notably Your Horse Source - though that one came with a yellow tail ribbon with red crosshatching. They made significantly more of that SR, probably around 450-500 pieces; he’s nowhere near as rare as the gold-ribboned one.

I missed out on the gold-ribbon Belgian when he first came out. Maybe I didn’t have the money at the time, or I didn’t hear about him until after he sold out, or I was distracted by something else. I really can’t remember.

Several years later I found one for sale at BreyerFest - just a few rooms down from my own, at the HIN. The seller was quite surprised when I recognized him for what he was - and that I didn’t object to the price. (The price wasn’t high - it was just more than the more common red and yellow-ribboned one.) She had brought him because another buyer had expressed an interest in him initially; it was late Saturday night, and it was obvious that the buyer had either lost interest, or lacked money.

So he came home with me, instead.

The Belgian mold was prone to subtle, hard-to-differentiate SRs in the 1980s - likely the result of cost cutting, not a lack of imagination. I don’t know who was planned or ordered first, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the Eighmey’s SR and the slightly later SR were manufactured concurrently. Make one big batch of Matte Dapples - put gold ribbons on the pieces going to Eighmey’s, and yellow and red ribbons going to everyone else.

Two different SRs, for the cost of one. Less cost = more profit!

Dark Palomino Belgian

(From Breyer History Diva, 2010)

Another nearly forgotten Belgian is: the 1984 SR Dark Palomino Belgian, made for the Riegeseckers.


He’s nearly identical to the regular run #94 Belgian, except for the white mane and tail. Estimates put the piece count at around 200 - rare today, but not an untypical run in 1984.

Man, I remember 1984 - that was a rough year to be a college student and a Breyer collector on a budget. That year saw the release of the Buckskin Adios, the Palomino, Dapple Gray and Red Chestnut Pacers, the 7-piece G1 SM Draft Horse Set, the MHC flaxen chestnut Midnight Sun, the Kansas City Sham, the Red Roan Belgian, the Light Palomino Belgian and the Dark Palomino Belgian. And an insane amount of Holiday Catalog stuff: enough to fill up nearly two pages in the J. C. Penney’s Catalog, alone!

The number of SRs don’t come anywhere near to rivaling today’s breakneck pace, but in some ways it was way worse: it was pre-Internet. If you weren’t lucky, or well-connected, you’d easily miss out on some of the choicer items, like I did with the Dark Palomino Belgian. And you wouldn’t even know you had missed out on it until you saw it at a live show four or six months after it sold out. Oh, the pain!

Because of his similarity to both the regular run Flaxen Chestnut, and the even harder to find Light Palomino, the Dark Palomino SR was quickly forgotten. I kept him on my want list for years, even though most hobbyists I talked to had no idea who or what I was talking about.

In some ways, I figured his anonymity would work in my favor: if and when I managed to find him, I’d be able to get him for a song.

I did. I lucked out twice, in fact: first on MH$P, and then not long after on eBay, in a box lot with a bunch of other mid-1980s horses. I contemplated doing a two-horse hitch, until a lack of space and money made the decision for me.

A few years ago, Reeves released a very similar and rather popular model, the 777 Belgian. How similar? He has the chestnut body color, 4 stockings, and white mane and tail. But put them side by side, and the similiarities fade in comparison to the differences: the 777 also has a masked blaze, dark shading on his muzzle and ears, a red tail ribbon, and his right front hoof is tan, not gray.

Because of the 777 Belgian, the SR Dark Palomino still doesn’t attract much attention, or much money on the secondary market. So if you’re a Belgian lover,looking for something special to add to your collection, take a second look at the Chestnut ones. They might not be what they seem.