The First of the BreyerFest Loot

Some of the models I purchased as part of BreyerFest have begun arriving.

Of course, I have Ballynoe Castle RM, the Celebration Horse. (I remember when they used to be called dinner models! And dinner was served outside at the park - no air conditioning,  just open air tents! Haha!) He's nice, but I am not a fan of the mold so I will either sell him or donate him to a live show. Breyer Celebration Horse, #71136, 7/2020, free with 3 Day Ticket, Breyer.

I got the chestnut pinto 70th Anniversary Fighting Stallion, #1825, 2020, $50, Triple Mountain Models, 7/2020. He is lovely.

A 1980s Little Bit Stock Horse with box. Appaloosa, #9040, 1985-1988, $15, 7/2020, Triple Mountain Models.

And a blanket from the French World Equestrian Games held in 2014! $10, 7/2020, Triple Mountain Models.

Hopefully soon the rest of my purchases, all coming from Breyer, will get here soon.

Glossy Charcoal Fighting Stallion

I picked up this beauty at Devine Antiques yesterday for $54. Definitely worth the price!

 Glossy Charcoal Fighting Stallion, 1961-1963, $54

 You can't see it in the pictures, but it has footpad remnants (on the tail, too.)

I already had the piece, but the new one was such a good piece, I figured I could sell it or, if it was nicer than the one I already had, keep it as an upgrade and sell my old one. My first one is on the right and is much darker.

I think I will keep them both.

Harlequin - #4 Vintage Collectors Club

Breyer has announced the fourth (and last of the 2012) Vintage Collectors Club piece:

Harlequin!

He's the old Proud Arab Stallion in glossy Appaloosa. Gosh, is it beautiful. (I almost didn't join this club. It is limited to 500 members, and I am member 479. Sure am glad I changed my mind!)

Breyer History Diva had some comments to make about him. But I disagree with her on one point. Here's what she says:

(from Breyer History Diva, September 20, 2012)

Well, at least I was somewhere in the ballpark: the fourth Vintage Club release is a Proud Arabian Stallion in Gloss Gray Appaloosa, named Harlequin.

Not exactly what I was expecting, but still cool. And it does look like they absolutely nailed the color this time, with darker gray (not black) legs, and black hooves. The smaller, finer spotting the earliest Gray Appaloosas were known for is also present, a nicely observed point. I don’t have either of the Old Molds (ha!) but I do have a Fighting Stallion of the same vintage with those same sort of spots:

Isn’t he neat? Most Gray Appaloosa Fighters have bigger, sparser and more random spotting patterns, so when of my roommates at an earlier BreyerFest pulled him out of her sales stash, I just had to snag him. He was a little bit pricey (back when) but I thought then - and still do - that he was worth the splurge.

You see a lot of variation on that release’s paint job, but the fine speckling is definitely on the scarcer side. It’s not something you even see in any of the earliest Breyer ephemera, either, including the 1961 insert pages.

They did get one little detail on Harlequin wrong, though: he has eyewhites, and most Gray Appaloosas back then didn’t. They do show up from time to time - I’ve seen a couple of the Appaloosa Mustangs sporting ‘em - but it’s very unusual, and the prices I’ve seen on those pieces tend to reflect that.

She talks about the piece having darker, not black legs, and she is referring to this same color across molds. So, I got mine out to examine them, and I have a different take on the leg color.

 My fighting stallion (it used to belong to my sister, Leslie, but she gave it to me in the late 1980s/early1990s) has mixed-sized spots and definitely black legs.

 So does my Family Arab Stallion (Sue Seese's venerable Apache Dancer! She sent him to me in the 1990s as a gift.) Clearly, those lower legs are black, not grey as Breyer History Diva calls them.

The Semi-Rearing Mustang came with white points, not black (or grey) ones. I love this piece.

Usually Breyer History Diva knows her stuff, and although she writes in a very self-absorbed manner, it is worth reading through that to get the salient, reliable hobby information. So, based on that,  I am wondering if my pieces might be variations.

Mold Anniversary

(From Breyer History Diva, February, 2011)

When I was going over some of the documentation the other day for the post on the Western Prancing Horse, it got me to thinking about some of the other early Breyer releases. This year - 2011 - represents the Golden Anniversary of at least three molds: the Five-Gaiter, the Mustang, and the Fighting Stallion.

The Modernistic Buck and Doe also premiered in 1961, but as it’s likely that those molds were purchased by Breyer secondhand, it doesn’t seem quite right to put it in the same "graduating class" as the Gaiter, Mustang, and Fighter. There are a few hints that the Fighter might have debuted prior to 1961, too, but since he appears in that same batch of pages we now assume to be the 1961 catalog insert sheets, we’ll just go with that date for now.



I wonder if Reeves has anything planned for this special occasion? 

(From Breyer History Diva, September, 2011)

I finally found a little time yesterday to clean up the office a bit, so here’s a photo of a few of the weekend’s findings:


The Fighting Stallion is going to be a restoration experiment, the Bucking Bronco is a keeper (near mint, and just super!) and since I already own that particular variation of the Gem Twist, he'll be heading to the sales list after a bit more work.

The Gem Twist is from the first year of production (1993) and though you can’t see them in the photos, he sports the long, fully painted braids. The second version had the same braids, but with "ribbon dots" instead, and the third version had remodeled ribbons with similar dots. I don’t own the second version, but that’s more a matter of a lack of will than a reflection of its rarity: I have no idea which one is the rarest, to be honest. Haven’t bothered to do the research, though I probably should.

Aside from the ribbon remodeling, there was another significant, but invisible, change made to the mold: it was made less tippy. The earlier examples of the Gem Twist mold are extremely unstable; that glorious Moody tail made him exceptionally bottom heavy. You’ll find some that are "weighted" correctly, but it’s very hit or miss, and the guy I picked up Sunday is definitely a miss.

(He’s in otherwise pretty nice shape, other than a light scuffing and yellowing, so whoever owned him previously didn’t play with or display him much.)

Later models made with the Gem Twist mold tend to be less tippy, so Reeves was evidently aware of the problem, and took steps to correct it. I suspect some work was done on the interior surfaces of the mold (some areas shaved, others built up?) to even out the weight distribution. He’s still not the most trustworthy model on the shelf - none of mine are currently on display, mostly because of "Hurricane" Vita - but it does take a little bit more than a sneeze to knock the later examples over.

Bay Fighting Stallion

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)

I was doing a little research on a topic I had been planning on writing about today, but I found something else instead: more on the possible origins of the Five-Gaiter Sorrel Fighting Stallion. (This sort of thing happens all the time, which is why my list of future topics never gets any shorter.) I was cross-checking some data in my early Breyer pricelists, and something caught my eye:

Look familiar? It's the same photograph of the “Bay” Fighting Stallion we saw in the 1968 Collector's Manual that I concluded was the Sorrel Fighter:

The “new” data isn't really new: I've had it for several years now. It comes from a copy of the Frederick C. Wolf & Son Inc. pricelist, dated May 7-8, 1963. (One page is dated May 7, the rest are dated May 8.) They were wholesale jobbers and distributors based in Tacoma Washington.

Most of the data duplicates what we already know from the official 1963 price list; the importance of this list was that it was the first documentation that showed that the matte and gloss Alabaster Fighting Stallions really were two distinct, separate releases. The 1962/3 Red Bird Sales Pages documents that fact in better detail, but those were found a few years later.

(We're not sure what to make of the “Dancer” nickname given to the No. 31 Fighting Stallion: we don't have any other reference to this name anywhere else. We don't know if Breyer or the jobber made it up. Separate topic anyway.)

What this “discovery” means is that we can push back the possible manufacture date of the Sorrel Fighting Stallion back to 1963. Since this was the same year that the Bay colorway was formally introduced on the Fighting Stallion, that means that the Sorrels may predate the standard “Breyer Bay” version we all know and love.

The only question then becomes: where do the Gloss Bays fit in the chronology? We don't have any references at all for the Gloss Bay Fighting Stallions: no pictures, and no notations on any pricelists, mail order sheets or catalogs of a finish change.

Then, as now, some of Breyer's upcoming releases may have been made available early for holiday orders. My guess – and it's purely a guess – is that these first batches of Fighting Stallions were produced in Gloss, possibly as a part of the 1962 holiday shipments. Once regular production began, they switched over to the Matte.

That wouldn't explain why the photograph shows the Five-Gaiter Sorrel version of the Fighting Stallion, though. If the glosses came first, and they intended the Sorrel color all along, then there shouldn't be any Gloss Bays at all: just Gloss Sorrels. But that's not the case at all. (I also happen to think that more than a few of the “Gloss Bay” Fighters out there aren't 100% authentic, but again, that's a separate topic.)

There was a lot of color confusion in Breyer's early days: the same colors on different models had the same name. The “Bay” Western Prancing Horse was actually the same color as the “Sorrel” Five-Gaiter, and the “Chestnut” Running Mare and Foal were the same color as the “Bay” Quarter Horse Gelding (except for the finish.) And the #36 Racehorse was called “Bay,” but was actually Chestnut.

Maybe somebody – or a lot of somebodies – just got their shades of Bay mixed up. “We didn't mean the Prancing Horse Bay, we meant the Running Mare and Foal Bay!”

Speaking of the Running Mare and Foal, there's another theory about the color switch that I've been entertaining: Breyer may have been engaging in a little “matchmaking.” Customers liked buying matching family sets: since the Matte Bay Running Mare and Foal also came out around that time, maybe Breyer thought that by making the Fighter in the same color and finish, customers would assume that they were all members of the same family, and buy accordingly.

Fighting Stallion - Woodgrain

(Breyer History Diva, 2009.)

 Here’s a great example of the sort of thing that gets me out of bed before dawn on Sunday. I call him - Smudgie!


It’s a little hard to see in the full body shot, but his graining is actually smudged all over. For comparison, here’s his brother, who I picked up from the same dealer on a different day last year. He has more distinct and typical woodgraining:


(And yes, this guy is a variation too - but today is Smudgie’s day in the spotlight!)

Here’s a few closer-up shots for comparison (and proof that I don’t lie when it comes to my weak photography skills.)

Smudgie:



Smudgie’s Brother:



When I first saw Smudgie, I thought he was either damaged, or a fake; he looked a little like some early attempts at faux woodgrains I’ve seen. But he’s passed the scratch, sniff and dunk tests; even his foam footpads are intact. I’ve had some issues with the dealer I purchased him from (mostly because he knows just enough about Breyers to be a problem) but he’s totally unaware of even the notion of fakes, so I can say with some confidence that he’s 100% original finish.

Woodgrains vary a lot: the technique was messy, difficult and hard to master. Some have very distinct graining, and on others it’s almost invisible. It can be neat or sloppy, light or dark. But I’ve never seen one smudged like this before - there might be some smudging in an awkward spot or two, but all over?

The Fighting Stallion was the last production Woodgrain in the regular run line, lasting up through 1973. Other Woodgrains were being produced through the late 1960s and early 1970s, too, but they were probably special items manufactured mainly for Dunning Industries and their Ranchcraft Lamp line.

Smudgie has a USA mark, which means he is from the tail end of the Woodgrain production era. (His brother is, too!) That suggests a couple of possible explanations for his finish. He could have been an experiment with a slightly different, more subtle-looking woodgraining technique. Or, he could have just been a touched-up/fixed up cull - his woodgraining might have gotten smudged in spots in production, and in an effort to salvage him, they just smudged the rest of him up to match.

I tend to thing the latter explanation is probably more plausible than the former. I’m a little out of the normal geographic range for finding Chicago-era oddballs, for one thing. (It's not impossible, just unlikely.) The touch-up/fix-up hypothesis also make sense for the time period: he was likely manufactured no more than a year or two before the "True Chalky" era of the early to mid-1970s, when good quality translucent white Tenite was getting expensive. Breyer did a lot of creative things then to minimize waste and salvage what they could from the discard bins. Some models were painted over - and became Chalkies. (Well, mostly.) It’s not hard to believe that Smudgie is just the product of another type of creative salvage.

Black Adios

(Breyer History Diva, 2009.)

There is no such thing as a Black Adios Special Run. What you see here is also not a Black Adios: it’s a Mesa, in the extremely handsome and rarely used "Mahogany" paint job. (Few models would not be improved by it!) It’s probably the closest I’ll ever get to a Black Adios, and I’m okay with that:


I see the Black Adios on a lot of want lists as a valid item. Nancy Young listed it as such in her reference bible. And there are just enough of them out there that some folks may actually find one, lending credence to the idea of it being a special run. But what they’re buying isn’t really a special run.

A Special Run item has to have a few things going for it to qualify as a one. One characteristic is consistency: all of the models have to be the same, or nearly the same: one batch might have better shading than another, or slightly different markings, but the variability is relatively narrow.

The second characteristic is limitation: it is either available only for a limited time, in a limited quantity, or only through a specific dealer or venue.

The third characteristic is acknowledgment: it has to be advertised or distinguished from a regular run item.

Not every special run item shares every characteristic, but they do meet at least two of them. "Acknowledgement" probably the most controversial: a lot of early special runs - especially the XMAS catalog items, and the Woodgrain Ranchcraft Lamps - were never advertised as such, but that’s mostly because the term really didn’t exist back then.

"Acknowledgement" mainly applies to later items that are very similar or identical to regular run releases, but were specifically advertised as specials. The most obvious item would be the Toys R Us Bay Fighting Stallion - virtually identical to the regular run release, but sold a special run.

(There’s another subcategory of this kind of special I call Post-Production Specials, which are regular run items rereleased after their original discontinuation, but I’ll leave that esoteric concept for another time.)

The Black Adioses only really meet one of the criteria, and it’s only because of the person who was involved in their creation: Marney. The Adios model was a particular favorite of hers, and the black paint job was an extremely easy one to render. Any Adios cull with reasonably clean seams could quickly, and easily, be transformed into a Black Adios.

Markings on these Adioses varied widely - some had leg markings, facial markings, gray hooves, tan hooves, black hooves - whatever Marney’s mood and the condition of the body allowed.

They were made over a period of years; she didn’t have a stockpile of Black Adioses waiting for shipment or orders to come in. They were made whenever she had access, opportunity, and potential customers. Some were reputedly available as a gift at the end of factory tours. 

So they were not limited by time or quantity. There was no real consistency in markings or finish. They were not really advertised as special runs, though Marney was never really consistent with that terminology one way or another either. They were available almost exclusively through Marney, but that’s because she was probably the one making them on an ad hoc basis.

So what do we call them? How do we classify them? It’s a good question I really have no answer for: he’s a unique case. The Black Adios is the Black Adios.

Woodgrains - Non-rare

(Breyer History Diva, 2009.)


Some Woodgrains are so common (relatively) that they border on the boring. Even the nicest, most perfect examples of the Family Arabians or the Fighting Stallion will rarely break the $100 price barrier. They had the longest production runs of all the Woodgrains - about 7 years for the Family Arabians, and about 14(!) for the Fighting Stallion.

If you found them with their original boxes or stickers - either the Gold Foil Tenite, or the later blue ribbon - that might change things a little bit. And surprisingly, it’d be the Blue Ribbon Sticker that’d bring the higher premium, rather than the Gold Foil.

Gold Foil Tenite stickers are relatively common on Woodgrains - "common" defined here as "not that difficult to find." In fact, most Gold Foil stickers are found on Woodgrains - not exclusively, but darn near it. This may be a consequence of who bought Woodgrains, and why: Woodgrains were marketed more as decorative items than toys. "Play" Breyers would naturally lose their stickers more quickly than "display" Breyers.

According to my research, the Blue Ribbon Sticker Era began ca. 1966 and continued through 1970, more or less. (Leftover stickers were used until they ran out, presumably in early 1971.) The Fighting Stallion and Family Arabians were the only regular run Woodgrains that continued production into the Blue Ribbon Sticker era.

If my hypothesis on the Ranchcraft Woodgrains is true, most of those were also made during the blue ribbon sticker era, but I haven’t seen or heard of any bearing the sticker. My guess would be that since they were being sold to a manufacturer as a "lamp component" the sticker wasn’t seen as necessary. They might also have given lamp purchasers the impression that Breyer manufactured the lamps themselves.

Chances are that your first Woodgrain - most collectors’ first Woodgrains - was a Family Arabian or a Fighting Stallion. They were definitely among mine. I was still thrilled to find them, of course: Woodgrains are rather difficult to find in these parts, for reasons unknown. I still get a bit of a thrill, after all these years, whenever I find a Woodgrain Fighting Stallion. (Gloss Charcoal Fighting Stallions, on the other hand, I could swear they sold them in bulk around here …)

Sorrel Color

(From Breyer History Diva, 2009.)

The Sorrel Fighting Stallion - FOUND!

This is a post about the importance of using original source materials, not copies.

There are a number of models from the 1960s that came in the Five-Gaiter’s unique "Sorrel" color palette: the Family Arabians, the Western Prancing Horse, the "Bay" version of the original Donkey, and most notoriously, the Fighting Stallion. Some hobbyists assumed that these models were a rare and/or unknown special run or special order of some type.

I speculated, in an article I wrote several years ago for one of mySamplers, that these models were just a color variation of the Bay: in fact, the majority of "Bay" Western Prancing Horses are in this peculiar shade (one that I sometimes refer to as "Chocolate Milk Sorrel.") It’s only at the very end of the Bay WPH’s run where they actually start looking more Bay-like (but he never becomes true "Breyer Bay": he keeps his gray hooves!)

(Oh, the irony: the "Bay" version of the Bay Western Prancing Horse is actually the variation!)

While scanning the picture for the previous post from the 1968 Collector’s Manual, I took a closer look at the Fighting Stallion’s picture. Even though the picture is small, and in printed in sepiatones, the photo is obviously of the Sorrel version. He has the gray hooves typical of the Five-Gaiter’s Sorrel paint job!


For comparison, here’s a photo of the Bay Rearing Stallion from the same catalog. His hooves are quite obviously black.


The hooves are the main characteristic used to distinguish the Bay from the Sorrel. The body and mane/tail color may vary greatly and can be almost indistinguishable from Bay, but the Sorrel always has light gray hooves. Always.

The photographs used in the 1968 catalog are the same ones used in the 1966 through 1968 price lists; I don’t know if they were used anywhere else. The various incarnations of the Dealer’s Catalogs from 1966 through 1969 depict the Alabaster, not the Bay. The 1965 Dealer’s Catalog does use a sepiatone version of what appears to be a Bay Fighting Stallion to depict the Rearing Stallion (who was new for that year.) Unfortunately, I don't have a very good copy, so I really can’t make any judgments from it one way or another.

And that’s what the issue was here. I didn’t notice the gray hooves in the 1966-1968 pricelist pictures because they weren’t originals: they were multi-generational copies. I couldn’t tell that the hooves weren’t black - they were too small, and too blurred, for me to tell. My 1968 Collector’s Manual is an original, with the original contrasts and tones preserved.

It doesn’t just happen in black and white copies, either: color shifts occur in color copies and photographs, too. It’s particularly a problem with digital pictures on the Internet; most people don’t change the settings on their cameras, which are often set to make automatic color corrections. Whites get whiter, darks get darker, and colors shift from warmer tones to cooler ones, depending on the light source.