Christoff

 Breyer made another beautiful winter decorator, and despite it being a Classic sized piece, I bought it. It was just too lovely not to.

Christoff, Winter Decorator, $25, #712416, 2020 only, 11/2020, Breyer.

70th Anniversary Stablemate Mystery Surprise

 I've had mixed success with Breyer's blind bags - while I think the monetary value of what I've gotten was definitely fair and worth it, often I was disappointed to discover that the items in my blind bag were things I already had.

Never have I done Breyer's Mystery Surprise bags - I'm not really a Stablemate collector (or so I tell myself) - but then Breyer started shrinking down some of my favorite old molds to celebrate their 70th Anniversary. 

Including the Indian Pony, one of my favorite molds of all, in the early chestnut pinto. Then reports on social media said that a second, more elusive, chase piece had been discovered  - a blue decorator Indian Pony.

(Photo from Identify Your Breyer and contributed by Triple Mountain Model Horses.)

She was very expensive on the secondary market ($36 to over $200!) so I wasn't going to find her that way. I figured that I wouldn't be able to have one. And then, Breyer had a sale and I had a really good coupon.  I took the plunge and ordered a case.

70th Anniversary Mystery Surprise Horse Blind Bag, case of 24, #6065, $109, 11/2020, Breyer.

The box arrived yesterday. I opened it and looked at that assortment, wondering if I'd been lucky and I'd find a blue Indian Pony in there for me. I grabbed a bag, felt the outline of what was inside, and realized that there was an Indian Pony inside. But was it the blue chase piece?

Bingo!! It was! Twenty-four packages, and the first one I opened had the piece I wanted! What are the chances on that?!

I'd read online that the Indian Pony could be found once in every 12 cases. If true, and with 24 pieces per case, that made my chances of finding her 1 in 288. Wow!

I took pictures of her yesterday and today in a variety of lights, and her spots are definitely gold. A check on eBay and Identify Your Breyer seems to show the same thing. It's hard to see here, but her legs are a solid color and a different shade of blue than her body and head. 

I also got two of the Indian Ponies in the iconic early Breyer pinto color. They will look nice next to my other two that are Traditional sized. 

There were three woodgrain Cydesdales. There are no neck wrinkles, but there is other musculature, so I am still deciding if they shrank down the no muscle version or the later muscled one. I lean toward the latter. 

Three gorgeous glossy charcoal Fighting Stallions.

Three sweet Fell Ponies. (I am going to keep one of these - he is darling!)

Three Missouri Fox Trotters whose shades varied from piece to piece.

Three Smart Chic Olenas (these will be donations or sold.)

I've never been a fan of the Connemara Mare (Croi) but I do like her in Stablemate form and black is my favorite horse color so I will be keeping one of these. Manes and tails like that are Pony Pal magnets.

The color on the Gypsy Vanner is lovely - with that flying mane, tail, and feathers, these three are going to a couple of Pony Pals for Christmas, too.

This gal is staying with me. I love her and am so glad I took that chance and bought that case of Mystery Surprise Stablemates. 

My Second Real Decorator

How ironic that I have looked for decorators for years and years, decades even, without success, and then I find two in the space of one month.

(Photos from eBay auction.)

Gold Charm Running Foal, #3130, 1963-1964, $265, eBay, 3/2018, Marsha Alesi, 7630 Chicago Dr., La Mesa, CA 91941.

 He has some black marks and a chipped eartip, but is still beautiful.

I am thrilled to add this piece to my collection.

And I have to smile - it has been a very rainy spring break - I guess when it rains, it pours!

My First Real Decorator

I have wanted a Breyer decorator, the real kind from the 1960s, not the current ones, for decades. While woodgrain was a decorator color back them and I have a lot of woodgrains, what I am referring to are the colors wedgwood, copenhagen, florentine, and gold charm that were done on the Running Mare and Foal, Five Gaiter, Semi Rearing Stallion, and the Fighting Stallion.

You'd think that since I was collecting when those were being produced, I might have one, but I don't!

Prices on Breyers seem to be down, and so I have been watching eBay closely This past week, I scored my very first REAL decorator as a result. (All photos from eBay auction listing.)

 A wedgwood Running Foal! My favorite of the four decorator colors!

 Wedgwood Running Foal, #4120, 1963-1964, $284, eBay, 3/2018, Lauren Bang, 918 Pennsylvania St. #206, Denver CO. 80209.

He's a lighter blue with gorgeous shading. He also has some black marks that I will need to remove and a broken earth to fix.

I am pleased to have him - in the past, they have sold for $1500, more than I would ever spend on a piece for my collection. Spending what I did really gave me pause as it was.

But he is mine now, and I could not be happier.

Christmas 2015 Holly & Ivy

The day before Christmas, Breyer sent out an email telling collectors that there would be a surprise Christmas morning on the web site.

At about 11:00 AM, they posted this:

Two new beautiful decorator colors on the Flash mold with free shipping anywhere in the world! It was open only to members of the Collector Club.

I had my order in by 11:08 AM. (Guess it's a good thing that this was a year without the kids and their families on Christmas day!!)

After a most circuitous route (see earlier post) mine arrived on January 6. I was hoping for an Ivy, although I would have been happy with a Holly, too.

 I got Ivy!!  I say he is a medium lacy pattern, judging from the other photos on Blab.

Ivy, #712167, $95, only 350 made, 2015 Holiday Collector Club Special, $95, 12/2015, Breyer.

Vintage Club #3 2015 - Running Stallion

Gold charm as been my least favorite decorator color ever since the gold charm Secretariats were produced. So, when it was announced that offering #3 from the Vintage Collectors Club would be a decorator, I hoped I would not get one in gold charm.

And then I saw a picture of one on Model Horse Blab and changed my mind. Good thing, too, because mine is a gold charm! And I LOVE it!!

Sailor, #712143, 3rd offering in 2015 Vintage Collectors Club, $135, 125 pieces made in each of four decorator colors. (This is gold charm.)

Chalkies and Decorators

From Breyer History Diva, March, 2013 (She is commenting on a Blab thread about the discovery that some chalkies originally were decorators.)

Chalky prices have been crazy for a while now, but with the recent discussion on Blab about the Decorator overpaints, the market for some of them - the molds used for Decorators, specifically - has really gone through the roof. 

(For those of you who are not familiar with them, they would be: the Five-Gaiter, the Running Mare, the Running Foal, the Fighting Stallion, and the Mustang.)

As more collectors hold their Chalkies up to a strong light (literally), more are being revealed. I’m now comfortable with saying that it appears that a significant chunk of the unsold warehouse stock of Decorators was probably "chalked" into other, better-selling colors. 

Not all Chalky Gaiters, Running Mares and Foals et al should automatically be assumed to be overpainted Decorators: only the ones without the USA mark have that potential. And the solid colors (Golden Charm, Wedgewood Blue) will be harder to discern in the light than the dappled ones (Florentine, Copenhagen). 

I have always wondered why the vintage Decorators were so gosh-darned-it rare, especially when other models from the 1960s with similarly short production runs aren’t quite as hard to find. A nice #191 Gray Bucking Bronco, for instance, can be tough, but not on the same level as almost any given Decorator. 

I just assumed that the rarity was a consequence of just how badly the sales did tank. Not entirely: it now appears that Breyer made aconcerted effort to make their first dismal foray into the home decorating market disappear, almost completely.

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? 

Purpose of Breyers?

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)

t’s the question that’s launched a thousand debates at live shows and online: what are Breyers, exactly? Are they toys, or collectibles?

The correct answer: they’re whatever you want them to be. I’m not trying to be clever or coy here: Breyer actually made that "ambiguity" central to their earliest advertising campaign. Their earliest known slogan was "It’s a Toy, a Welcome Gift, an Art Object, because it’s so real" (emphasis theirs, not mine.)


(Sorry for the moire patterning - it's the scanner again.)

Breyer was still a relative newcomer to the world of proprietary products then, and probably seemed like a safe bet to them to shoot for the widest possible customer base. (It’s cheap enough to be a toy, but classy enough to be home décor!)

By the early 1960s, though, different product lines, with different marketing strategies, started to emerge. Some were clearly marketed towards the home décor market - such as Decorators and Woodgrains - while others were clearly marketed as toys, like the Family Arabians (every model, in every color had a name!) Everything else sort-of fell in between: these were the slightly nicer and pricier models that members of the youth market to aspired to, and that the adult market also saw as an affordable and more durable alternative to comparable china figurines.

By the late 1960s, these loose distinctions in their product line fell apart. The short and simple reason why? Hobbyists. Breyer had been aware of the "hobby," such as it was, by the early 1960s, but it wasn’t until the late 1960s - with sales lagging, and the brand in danger of being discontinued completely - that Breyer finally decided to tap into the hobbyist market. And hobbyists preferred a more realistic model horse.

Pieces designed for "home décor" didn’t disappear overnight; they just didn’t get quite the same attention and marketing push that pieces designed for the toy and hobbyist markets did. Woodgrains continued to be made into the early 1970s - mostly as special runs for the Ranchcraft Lamps - and a handful glosses and nonrealistic colors were mixed into the regular run line.

In recent years Reeves has attempted to recapture a larger portion of the home décor market. Someone on Blab recently resurrected anancient thread - from 2004! - about an attempt by Reeves to grab a bigger piece of that market. A few models featured in that failed launch were later repurposed; I think the 2006 Porcelain release Tally Ho might have been one of them.

Etymology and Decorators

(from Breyer History Diva, 2009)

Today's topic will be the spare, rare history of the Decorator.

As I hinted before in our 3-part discussion about Christmas Decorators, documentation for actual Decorators is also extremely sparse. In fact, we have only four pieces of documentary evidence:

1. A “Supplemental Price List” dated April 1, 1964, that lists all of the models we now call Decorators. There are actually two near identical copies of this pricelist, one printed on light blue paper, and the other, on yellow (blue and gold, get it?)
2. A picture in the 1964 Alden's Christmas Book, featuring a pair of “Copenhagen Dappled Horses” for the hefty sum of 6.99. The catalog copy: “magnificently detailed of china-like fine quality plastic. Break-resistant! Lovely mare with foal for her novelty shelves or a favorite youngster's room.” (The Running Mare and Foal, obviously.)
3. A full-color photograph showing the entire Decorator line, complete with numbers. Stamped on the back of this photo is the notation “Please mail your order to J.C. Unger ...”
4. The photograph of the Copenhagen Belgian that appeared in an issue of JAH back in 1980.

That's it. It doesn't seem like a lot – and it isn't – but it's a lot more than we have for many early Breyer releases. But did you notice what's missing from the paper evidence?

On none of these pieces of evidence is the word “Decorator” even used.

Looking through my early ephemera, the closest we come to the word Decorator is in the Dealer Catalog references to the Modernistic Buck and Doe, who are called “Delightfully Decorative.” Marney labels them as “Modernistic/Decorator” and includes them in the Decorator section of her book, but provides no other evidence or documentation linking the two together, only noting that the Deer were “originally created as Christmas decorative pieces.” The two existing catalog pages that feature the Deer also note this, seen here on the ca. 1961 catalog insert page:

They are metallic gold – and predate the horses by at least a year – so it's possible that this is where the term originated. But was the term “Decorator” itself an internally-created one that we simply don't have the documentation for – yet – or was it a term that just arose in the hobby organically, like “Chalky” did?

Marney was pretty much the source of all Breyer knowledge back then, so I'm inclined to believe that the origins of the term, or its popularization in the model horse lexicon, are with her somehow.

It's possible that Marney may have overheard the term from someone at the factory, or may have seen the word used in conjunction with a local store's advertising campaign, or had access to a document, now lost, that used it specifically. Or maybe Marney just made it up – based on the promotional stuff for the Buck and Doe – and the hobby just adopted it as a matter of course. (Who were we to doubt Marney's knowledge then?)

I also remember – I truly can't say where or from whom I heard this bit of information – that the term Decorator was also used to describe Woodgrains. (Marney, again?) The earliest references I have for Woodgrains – the sepiatone ca. 1960 Dealer Catalog, and two Mission Supply House fliers, ca. 1961 – only refer to them as “Wood Grains” or as part of the “Wood Grain Series.” If true, it might be a point in favor of the “in-house” theory for the origin of the term: maybe it was just the word they used around the factory to describe all of the “nonrealistic” finishes. (Charcoal, at the time, was probably considered “realistic.”)

By the way, the term didn't become the single word “Woodgrain” until 1970, and only then on the pricelists. The Fighting Stallion – the only remaining regular run Woodgrain, seen in the Collector's Manuals from 1968 through 1973 – was always described as “Wood Grain.”

Oh, to have had access to Marney's original research notes and documentation. What new discoveries could be made there, what mysteries could be revealed, with fresh eyes? If only, if only.

Silver FIligree

(From Breyer History Diva, 2009.)


Silver Filigree is one of the “newer” Decorator colors, first issued on the lovely and highly coveted 1993 BreyerFest Judge's Model Proud Arabian Mare. It wasn't used again until 1999, when The Ginger Horse commissioned a Legionario in that color as a special run for Equitana that year. It had been used sporadically since then, but within the past couple of years it appears that Reeves has decided that Silver Filigree – and hobbyist favorite Gloss Charcoal, to a degree – are their Decorator colors of choice to drive us all crazy.

While other Decorator colors have lost a bit of their luster with recent reissues, the “mystique” of Silver Filigree continues unabated. That's mostly because except for the Legionario “Grane of Gotterdammerung,” who had a healthy 2000 piece run, virtually all of the other Silver Filigrees Reeves has issued have either had extremely low piece counts, restricted distribution, or both:

Proud Arabian Mare: Volunteer Model (30)
Saturday Night Fever (Proud Arabian Stallion): BreyerFest Raffle (26)
Born to Run (Proud Arabian Foal): BreyerFest Raffle (26)
Quicksilver (Clydesdale Foal): BreyerFest Contest Prize (<30)
Silver: Treasure Hunt Surprise (250?)
Silver Snow (Othello): Web Special (200)
Surprise (Quarter Horse Gelding): BreyerFest Gambler's Choice (10)

That's not including tests and auction pieces, which are by nature either unique or close to it. (And I just noticed that five of the eight official releases were BreyerFest-related, too! Interesting.) There may also be a very small run of Running Foals (less than five?) that was associated in some way with the Ginger Horse's promotion of the Grane model, but I've only heard rumors of this little fellow, and no pictures, so I'm a bit reluctant to list it as something official. (Any pics or links would be appreciated!)

It's a smart move, albeit a frustrating one for those of us who absolutely love the color: by associating a certain color with rarity and exclusivity, it makes new releases in that color even more desirable. That's what fueled the online feeding frenzy with the Silver Snow: for a lot of collectors, it was a rare chance to get an example of a rare color, at a reasonable price.

Remember when we used to get the same thrill when they started rereleasing the old Decorator colors on new molds? They still have the power to excite hobbyists – especially when a new or popular mold is involved – but they are no longer as rare and exclusive as they used to be. If you really want a Florentine, Copenhagen, Gold Charm or Wedgewood Blue and you're not extremely picky about your choice of mold, you can get a newer release for a not-scary price (well, maybe not Wedgewood Blue, just yet. Talk about another color that drives collectors crazy!)

The only Silver Filigrees I have so far are the more “common” Grane and Silver Snow – and I was lucky to have a friend help me with the Silver Snow. I'd love any of the others, but I don't have that kind of money or luck right now. Maybe I'll be lucky or rich in the future: I doubt we've seen the last of this color. (Silver Filigree or Charcoal would look mighty fine on the Stretch Morgan, don't you think? It would also probably cause my head to explode.)

No discussion of Silver Filigree is complete without mentioning the fact that we also owe its existence to the power of suggestion. And in this case, it's one of those rare instances where one person was responsible: the late hobbyist Shirley Ketchuck. The Powers That Be at Reeves liked her idea, and started making their own.