Whatta Doll! It Costs Collector a Record $48,000

A record on the American doll market was set Saturday in Anaheim when a Pennsylvania antiques dealer paid $48,000 for an extremely rare 24-inch German doll handcrafted sometime around 1910.

Richard Wright of Birch Runville, Pa., made the high bid at an auction at the Hyatt Alicante. The previous record was the $45,000 paid for a 19th-Century French doll sold at an auction in Los Angeles two years ago.

Wright, who was called one of the most important antique doll dealers in the world by several bidders at the Anaheim auction, said he intended to keep the doll for his own permanent collection. Known only as a Kammer and Reinhardt Model 106, the boy doll is made from bisque ceramic and has blue-gray eyes and light brown hair.

Lacks One in Collection

“I bought him because I’ve been collecting the Kammer and Reinhardt series for 25 years,” Wright, 41, said after the auction, beaming and clutching the doll to his chest. He said that of the Kammer and Reinhardt model 100 series, which is numbered from 100 to 114, he lacks only Model 105.

Because of the sale of Model 106, several experts had called the auction one of the most important events for doll collectors in some time.

The auction raised $125,000 for a scholarship fund at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Last year, more than 300 dolls, including Model 106, were donated to the institute by the estate of Lucy Earle, a widowed antique collector from Pacific Palisades who died in 1987 at the age of 95. Seventy-five of the dolls auctioned Saturday were from Earle’s collection.

“My blood is racing. I can’t believe it,” Dan Pavillard, CalArts’ vice president for development, said immediately after Model 106 sold. “We’d like to think that (Lucy Earle), who loved and enjoyed the arts, would be thrilled with what we’ve done here at the auction and that art students are going to benefit as a result of her gift to the school.”

Made Before WWI

Model 106, which featured a more natural and less-idealized face than other models, was made at the factory of Ernst Kammer and Franz Reinhardt before World War I. But most of the dolls reportedly were destroyed by German department stores when they did not sell. Only three Model 106 dolls were known to have survived until Earle’s collection was made public.

George Theriault, who conducted the auction, said Model 106 had been expected to sell for around $25,000.

“That was exciting,” Theriault said of the the winning bid. “It was nothing we anticipated.”

The highest price worldwide for a doll was “well over $100,000,” paid last year for an 18th-Century doll in England, said Theriault, whose Maryland-based doll auctioneering firm is the largest of its kind in the world.

More than 200 dolls and doll-related antiques were sold at Saturday’s auction. Several hundred doll collectors and dealers traveled from throughout the United States and several foreign countries to bid.

‘Dying of Envy’

“I’m dying of envy,” said collector Helen Boothe of Sun City, Ariz., as she walked through the room where the dolls were displayed before the auction.

After Model 106 sold and the audience learned that Wright was the buyer, several people indicated they were not surprised.

Rosalie Whyel, a collector from Fairbanks, Alaska, and a friend of Wright’s who lost to him in the bidding for Model 106 by only $1,000, was sitting several rows in front of Wright at the auction. “I didn’t know it was him who was bidding. But I could feel him behind me,” she said.

Whyel did not leave the auction disappointed, though. She made the second-highest purchase when she bought a rare French Bru doll for $31,000.

Whyel said she has also bought dolls from Wright, who travels the world for them.

“I can purchase 1,000 dolls in one day and then a week later have only five left,” Wright said. Doll collecting, he added, is becoming “a very international thing. It’s very big in Europe now, and it’s especially popular in Japan. They can’t get enough over there.”