The piano baby is one of the most endearing relics of Victorian consumer culture.
By the late-19th Century, if you built a house, it needed to have a music room, which needed a piano, which needed a shawl to keep it dust free, which needed something to keep the silk thing from slipping off.
That thing was an adorable bisque porcelain figurine called the piano baby.
Bisque is unglazed porcelain. The British call it biscuit porcelain, and it was very popular from the 1880s up until the First World War.
Mostly made in Germany, pairs of bisque figurines of romantic young boys and girls stained in bright pastels were featured prominently on fireplace mantels, bookshelves, ladies’ desks and vanities.
Piano babies at least offered the pretense of serving a useful purpose.
But they were so irresistibly adorable they immediately became collectible, and before long there was a whole nursery of babies weighing down the piano shawl in sizes from three to 18 inches.
The best piano babies were made by Gebrüder Heubach (Heubach Brothers), a German company founded by Georg Christoph and Phillipp Jakob Heubach in Lichte, Thuringia, in 1843.
The reason Heubach figures are so special is because in 1863 the company started a school for porcelain sculpting, and trained their artists to create naturally expressive faces with distinctive hairstyles and quirky features, like dimples.
It was the deep, intaglio-cut, painted eyes that gave their piano babies the depth of realism they are famous for. Most Heubach babies, by the way, are boys.
The company went on to be one of the largest manufacturers of bisque dolls heads, boys and girls, and supplied doll companies throughout Europe and the United States.
Heubach used various marks during its history, but the most common are: a circle with a rising sun in the top half and the initials H over G in the bottom half; or a series of dots forming a right angle in the upper right corner above the letters “HEU” over “BACH.”
Unmarked pieces will bear the usual impressed numbers underneath that many German companies used.
These can be identified as Heubach by their quality and certain characteristics, like dimpled cheeks. Marked pieces will be more valuable.
Appraisals: Baby on back, 8¾”, $270; Baby sitting up w/feet crossed at the ankles, 8½”, $350; Baby crawling, unmarked, 5½”, $165; Baby sitting up touching toe, 7½”, $250; Pair of babies, one looking at one shoe off, one looking at one shoe on, 12″, $600; Naked baby sucking toe, 7″, $1,000.
Arthur Schwerdt, a certified appraiser, is author of “The Antique Story Book: Finding the Real Value of Old Things,” and co-owner of The August Farmhouse Antiques on Route 9 in Swainton. Send your comments or appraisal requests with photos to aschwerdt@cmcherald.com.