New Images for 2004
These are some new items I have collected. Click for a larger image or a page about the item.

More new stuff: a page on Madame Butterfly, the story, play, and opera
A page of Glamour and Risqué illustrations!
A French book about an English felt doll and his courtship of a Japanese doll: Pierre Pons.
 

A delightful image in which the little boy, very exotic-looking about the eyes, seems modeled on the doll. with his "tonsure" haircut.

This picture reappears in other contexts, such as the  1896 American Our Darlings'  ABC Book

Three dolls, two Japanese and one evidently reprenting a girl or boy of African descent. The verse does not mention dolls or Japan.

This is clearly one of a series of Tuck cards, all with Burnside verses, depicting Japanese dolls of various kinds.All these cards have a similar size and format, with die-cut edges. This and the "Mellee Christmas" card both have greetings in a pseudo-Chinese "accent," mistaken evidently for pseudo-Japanese.

The Japanese doll is shown from the back, recognizable by his "tonsure."
 

These are two of a set of 12, 6 boys and 6 girls. Interestingly, it is the boys who are shown playing with dolls:  acting out a puppet show with dolls on strings (as does Bottaro's geisha, below) and hooking up a doll in a cart to an insect. (The first of these cards is also shown on another page of this site).

This is one of a set of at least two posed photographic postcards: the other shows the little girl with the same dolls, but  she is standing or kneeling behind a table with the dolls arranged in a more orderly way. 

The little girls are lovely and seem to exist in a timeless world (their dress seems almost medieval). The doll however is an excellent portrait of a typical imported ichimatsu of the 1890s.

Click for poem and illustrations. The doll illustrated and described seems to be a boy doll, though it is presented in the text as a girl. The detail here is from the cover of Great Big Story Book.

No dolls here, but an interesting image of three Japanese men dressed for work or travel in rainy weather. The brief text notes that their strange clothes are meant for a pilgrimage. The plate is used for the frontispiece and cover of a book that is mostly a collection of unrelated stories and pictures.
 

         A story about a little girl who would like to be a Japanese dolly but would not want to marry one....! She wishes to be doll-sized and embarks on a tour of the world with her doll husband, an English admiral. Click for text as well as illustrations.

This pincushion is made of Western fabrics with a Japanese doll head sewn in at the top. The ribbon trim forms "sleeves" but there are no arms; it also forms a loop to hang the doll. It seems clearly to fit this allusion:

As they halted before the entrance a little Jap [doll] appeared, and the children exclaimed in delight, as he looked for all the world like the hat-pin cushions hanging beside the dressers at home.

I already had one of these on the toys page, but I acquired another that was in his box!

Three various examples.

In 1895 China ceded the island of Formosa (modern Taiwan) to Japan. One of the most important products of the island was Oolong tea, a specially prepared type. This Japanese doll seems to have been created to help promote the tea as a Japanese product.
Thanks to Ari Wagner for the use of this photo.

No signature, inscription, or date, but a charming image.

No date. This could have been taken in Japan or elsewhere. The girl has a big bow in her hair and stands by a balustrade on a wooden terrace overlooking the sea, with a large botat or ship passing.

This is a retelling of a popular Japanese tale, "the old man who made the withered trees bloom." However, Markino makes a few changes and includes a bit from another story, "the fairies' mallet," which allows him to include a couple of dolls in a picture. For another picture, from about the same period, showing the same scene, see Warwick Goble's illusration.

This book by a popular English artist and her brother includes at two color illustrations showing a litle Japanese girl with her dogs and dolls, and a line drawing of a doll, too.

This charming image shows a girl doll, and gives an idea of the typical size of such dolls in this period.

This is one of a series of postcards in which cupids representing various ethnicities or styles threaten women of a similar type. The cupid here seems clearly modeled on a Japanese doll, with doll-like hands, feet, and "tonsure" hairstyle. The wings are suggest the artist might have seen  the painted butterfly wings on some Japanese dancing dolls, and even the scroll is an accessory of some Japanese dolls. However, the face looks like an attempt to represent an idealized but Oriental child.

Large format with pictures and verses of children from various lands. Except for the American Indian boy, most of them are a bit naughty or else little consumers, as here. Note that again the doll is identiable from the back.

"See my pretty dolly,"
Said little Miss Hago.
"Papa brought it all the way
From far-off Tokio."

The drawing is very Art Deco, the verse perhaps somewhat "retro" in the 1920s:

Jappy's making funny sounds
It's just his Jap doll way
Of saying that he hopes you'll have
A very nice birthday.

There is no text describing this image. The bear is the minister, and the other dolls include two black dolls, one a little girl and the other a tiny ceramic "flower boy" who looks like the advertising figures "the Gold Dust Twins."

Compare this paper doll page to Drayton's 1917 page, which included a Japanese doll and a "Jap dog." In the 1928 version, Dolly has short hair instead of long curls, and a flying suit as well as a kimono. She seems to have become an intrepid traveller rather than just a little girl playing dress-up. Instead of a doll she has the Buddha mascot "for luck."
 

A very elegant and sensitive design, complete with the lovely "Japanese" screen showing shadows of irises and flying birds.
The puppets clearly are not practical (that is, they could not be worked as marionettes as depicted). Note that the gentleman wears shoes rather than Japanese footwear. He is himself a puppeteer, though the dragon he holds up is not much like the conventional Japanese hand puppets.

This ia a homely and not very Japanese-looking doll, but it is probablymeant to represent the Japanese type. Some Japanese dolls were made with the kimono sewn in a seam up the center.

The card was written in French and the date seems to be 1942. The doll looks as if it were a European compo or ceramic doll--note the big shoes.

Flora White here includes a Japanese doll among a little girl's Christmas gifts. She also created a series of fanciful, very decorative cards with verses showing Japanese children; for a "little Jap" (boy, not doll) "Fishing for the Moon," see here.

Here the Japanese doll is on the floor while the blonde doll shares the little girl's meal.

This evidently formed part of a ca. 1900 die-cut toy 
similar to the Jewel Stoves toy above.
(entire item shown)

This was a bit of scrap pasted into a scrapbook.The Japanese baby does look like a real baby, not a doll. He holds a Japanese flag.

One of a series: 2. "Washing is Hard Work."
I have seen another postcard with the same setup, but a better image of the Japanese doll trying to climb into the washtub. The somewhat disturbing image of a little girl in her underwear is common and I am not sure to what extent it was intended to be provocative, and to what extent it passed as cute and innocent.

The next year I acquired another postcard from the same series, this one mailed in Australia. It is #3, "Dolly's Afternoon Tea," and includes the Japanese doll.

This is one of a series of cards issued by Mclaughlin's which have two folding flaps so that the main figure can be covered, usually by a cloak of some kind. The main figure is generally a little girl, and in some of the cards, as here,  she embraces a figure of the same size; in others, she covers up a muff, basket, kitten, or other "surprise" under her cloak. 

The figure being embraced here is clearly a Japanese boy doll (note the wrist joints), so we must assume that the little girl, who is the same size, is herself not a girl but a doll. The image certainly echoes the stories of romances between a Japanese doll and a blonde girl doll.

This delightful illustration is one of two accompanying a 24-line poem called "Playing School." The other one, a line drawing, is signed R. A. Bell; the poem is not signed. The little girl speaks to her dolls by name:

Your [sic] all bent over, Dhjejebhoy!
Sit up, like Bell and Hilda here.
Don't interrupt me when I speak.
Your back is not so very weak....
Now, Dhjejebhoy, attned to me.
You're very naughty!