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.

More on Boxes

(From Breyer History Diva, 2010.)

Take a look at my most recent acquisition, an upgrade of my #72 Semi-rough cut Walking Polled Angus Bull, mint in his original illustrated shipper box:


I had been hoping to upgrade my Semi-rough cut for quite some time, but I wasn’t expecting one quite that grand. (An illustrated shipper? Awesome!) He’s so minty-mint, the wrapping tissue is still intact:


In case the snugness of the fit doesn’t boggle your mind, here’s the box in comparison to a Family Arabian Mare. No special reason for the selection of a FAM, other than her ubiquity:


It’s teeny-tiny! (Yeah, yeah, she’s a Sorrel FAM. She’s part of the office herd.)

I already knew how small the mold is (he’s only slightly larger than Classic scale, more or less) but it still blew my mind to see how comfortably the whole package fit into a standard 12 x 12 x 8 Priority Mail box.

The only damage incurred in his 50-year trip through time and space? A pair of very slight eartip rubs.

Breyer Bay

The Mysteries of Breyer Bay

Breyer has an … interesting history when it comes to the color Bay. They really didn’t start rendering the color "correctly" until the mid-1960s. What came before then - and for a long time afterwards - was a color I’ve come to call, for lack of a better term, "Breyer Bay."

Breyer Bay describes a red-brown base coat with a black mane, tail and hooves, four white stockings, and usually some manner of facial markings. What it lacks is the black legs or points that would make it a true "Bay." Some real-life horses do exist in this color as Breyer painted it, sorta, but I’m getting ahead of the discussion here.

Even Breyer couldn’t keep this version of the color straight in their minds: early catalogs refer to the Running Mare and Foal in this color as "Chestnut" while at the same time calling the Family Arabians and QH Gelding in this very same color "Bay." (All the while calling the distinctly chestnutty #36 Racehorse "Bay.")


And adding to the confusion, Running Mare and Foal were labeled as Chestnut through 1970 in the Dealer Price Lists, but they continued to be called Chestnut in the Collector’s Manuals through 1975! (Yes, this pretty girl is a semi-gloss with eyewhites. NFS!)

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.