Doll's house in the collection of Carlton Hobbs LLC.
The manufacture of European dolls’ houses, or “baby houses” as they were first called, began as early as the 16th century, with the first known house being built for Duke Albert V of Bavaria. Germany, Holland, and the Netherlands were the most prevalent producers and collectors and, after the Revolution of 1687, Dutch King William brought the trend to Britain. It was the English dolls’ houses that were, from the beginning, built with genuine façades. This doll’s house in the Carlton Hobbs collection, believed to be from the first half of the 18th century for its construction in oak, was built in the Palladian style using various architectural manuals of the period.
Houses were custom built as idealized replicas of wealthy owners’ own homes and were not used as toys, but as displays of social status and wealth. The dolls’ houses were commissioned with impeccably detailed interiors and positioned in places of honor to be studied and admired by the children and visitors of a household. Furnishings were custom-made to scale with “even miniature copies of pictures and tapestry, china and plate,”1 and the cost of certain complete doll’s houses rivaled the price of an actual home at the time. It wasn’t until the 19th century, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, that dolls’ houses were produced in greater numbers and evolved into a children’s plaything to be enjoyed and collected.
Interior of the doll's house.
One such enthusiast was Vivien Greene (1905-2003), wife of the novelist Graham Greene, and one of the twentieth century’s most eminent collectors and researchers of antique dollhouses. Greene’s interest in dollhouses began during World War II, when she purchased an old dollhouse and passed the time repairing and refurbishing it. She “recognized that in miniature there can survive a record of what has so often been destroyed in full-size”2 and, after the war, she devoted herself to collecting and studying antique dollhouses, becoming “a pioneer of this branch of social history.”
Greene published two books on the topic: Dolls’ Houses of the 18th and 19th Centuries in 1955, and Family Dolls’ Houses in 1977. After the success of her first book, she built a museum called the Rotunda that allowed her to share with visitors “[her] enjoyment of all kinds and periods of English domestic architecture and decoration.”3 By the late 1990s, the Rotunda’s collection included dozens of miniature houses dating as far back as the late 17th century, all of exceptional quality and historical interest. In 1998, five years before Greene’s death at the age of 98, the Rotunda collection was auctioned off by Bonhams at Knightbridge, including the present house, listed as “Quantock Oak”.
Footnotes: 1. Greene, Vivien. English Dolls’ Houses of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. London: Batsford, 1955. 2. Christopher Hawtree “Obituary: Vivien Greene”. Independent, The (London). FindArticles.com. 24 Sep. 2008. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20030821/ai_n12702724 3. Ibid.
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