Painted Furniture.
The large cabinet with the Georgian horse and rider motif is a Ruth Pollock original, dated 1999. My mother took a class from Ruth Pollock and painted the yellow wall cabinet herself. The trunk below is signed by Ruth Pollock in 1998. I found a note tucked into the trunk that my mother wrote about meeting Ruth Pollock:
Sept. 2014
These are my favorite pieces. Ruth Pollock painted them and her husband made them. She lives in Spain. She is very well respected in Europe/England and USA. I took a class from her and painted a yellow cabinet on the wall in the colonial house and a chimney in the second bedroom.
She comes to the big miniature show in Chicago to teach classes along with many other artisans. I made several things at these shows—learned how to dress new dolls.
Note: These items are part of a family collection in a large extended family and will never be for sale. I post them for others to enjoy as fine examples of folk art and to inspire other miniaturists. For another Ruth Pollock piece, a wall cabinet, view this post on the Carl Larsson dollhouse: Painted Furniture.
Photos by Karen Nyenhuis.
The green trunk is signed by Ruth Pollock in 1998. The date reads 1868 and Olsen [unsure]. The trunk interior is painted in monochrome.
I would guess that the Scandinavian motif of the trunk, with a nod to rosemaling, depicts the traveling trunk of an immigrant family. Olsen is the Danish spelling of a Danish or Norwegian surname.
The yellow cabinet was painted by my mother during her class with Ruth Pollock at the Chicago Miniature Show.
For the next post in the series, click here: Bricks
An Historical Oxymoron – Right Era, Wrong Country
My mother made this tiled stove and painted it to match the motif in the toile wallpaper in her American colonial house. Toile is a French creation from the mid eighteenth century that the British adored. Tiled warming stoves were invented in Sweden in 1767 and were used throughout Scandinavia. The British and the American colonies did not use tiled stoves in the eighteenth century, so this stove should not be in an American colonial house.
To see more miniature tiled stoves, find the “Christmas in a Carl Larsson Dollhouse” series on my blog.
I found a well-annotated book that served as inspiration for my mother’s work. Creating the Look: Swedish Style by Katrin Cargill (Pantheon Books, 1986) contains a stove similar to this one on page sixteen, designed in the Gustavian style of King Gustav III, who ruled Sweden from 1771 to 1792.
