Pretty Pennies for Guise and Dolls

They weren’t the kind of dolls you see dangling from the arms of little girls. With prices this high, how could they be?

These French and German dolls dangled huge price tags. A Princess de Lamballe doll went for $53,000 last weekend at the Sutton Place Hotel in Newport Beach. Collectors from all over the world gathered to ogle the approximately 1,000 dolls at this upscale auction, sponsored by Theriault’s of Maryland.

Before the doors opened to the public Saturday morning, big-bucks buyers--juggling programs, magnifying glasses and cell phones--were allowed inside the ballroom for up-close inspections of the rare dolls, accessories and furniture made from the 1800s to 1940.

Many were French bisque fashion dolls from the mid-1800s, an era when dolls were treated like royalty and there were about 200 doll shops in Paris, where artisans created glazed porcelain heads and added painted eyes and Tibetan mohair locks. Innovations then were unjointed necks and fragile gutta-percha bodies (a compound based on Ceylon rubber and more pleasing than wooden bodies).

The dolls were done up in only the best: silk taffeta gowns; hoop skirts and embroidered corsets; black velvet heeled shoes with nailed leather soles and gold metallic trim; woven lace fingerless gloves; velvet bags with tiny gold French coins inside.

There were fringed parasols (with tiny open and close mechanisms), buggy whips with carved dog head handles, even flannel evening robes with matching paisley knit shawls and hand-stitched petit point slippers.

Don’t get us started on the gold-leaf furniture.

One last good one: A Huret doll, called Blondinette Davranches ($17,500 for the doll alone), even had tiny stationery embossed with the letter “B.”