Miniature Paintings OOAK

Miniature homes, furnished with domestic articles and resident inhabitants (both people and animals), have been made for thousands of years. The earliest known examples were found in the Egyptian Tombs of the Old Kingdom, created nearly five thousand years ago. These wooden models of servants, furnishings, boats, livestock and pets placed in the Pyramids almost certainly were made for religious purposes. The earliest known European dollhouses are from the Sixteenth Century. These baby or cabinet houses showed idealized interiors complete with extremely detailed furnishings and accessories (mostly hand made).

The early European dollhouses were each unique, constructed on a custom basis by individual craftsmen. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, factories began mass producing toys, including dollhouses and miniatures suitable for furnishing them. German companies noted for their dollhouses included Christian Hacker, Moritz Gottschalk, Elastolin, and Moritz Reichel. The list of important English companies includes Siber & Fleming, Evans & Cartwright, and Lines Brothers (which became Tri-ang). By the end of the nineteenth century American dollhouses were being made in the United States by The Bliss Manufacturing Company.

Germany was the producer of the most prized dollhouses and dollhouse miniatures up until The Great War. Notable German miniature companies included Marklin, Rock and Garner and others. Their products were not only avidly collected in Central Europe, but regularly exported to Britain and North America. Germany's involvement in WWI seriously impeded both production and export. New manufacturers in other countries arose.

The TynieToy Company of Providence, Rhode Island, made authentic replicas of American antique houses and furniture in a uniform scale beginning in about 1917. Other American companies of the early twentieth century were Roger Williams Toys, Tootsietoy, Schoenhut, and the Wisconsin Toy Co. Dollhouse dolls and miniatures were also produced in Japan, mostly by copying original German designs.

After World War II, dollshouses became mass produced in factories on a much larger scale with less detailed craftsmanship than ever before. By the 1950s, the typical dollhouse sold commercially was made of painted sheet metal filled with plastic furniture. Such houses cost little enough that the great majority of girls from the developed western countries that were not struggling with rebuilding after World War II could own one.

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The baby houses of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the toy dollhouses of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries rarely had uniform scales, even for the features or contents of any one individual house. Although a number of manufacturers made lines of miniature toy furniture in the Nineteenth Century, these products were not to a strict scale.
From left: half inch scale, three quarter inch scale, 1 inch scale, 1/10th scale

There have been several standard scales in dollhouses over the years. Children's toy houses during most of the 20th century were two third scale (where 1 foot is represented by 2/3 of an inch), also known as 1:18 (1" equals 18"). Popular brands included Lundby (Sweden) (established in 1947), Renwal, Plasco, Marx, Petite Princess, and T. Cohn (all American) and Caroline's Home, Barton, Dol-Toi and Triang (English). A few brands use 3/4-scale or 1:16 scale, which is also used for scale III model trains. With the exception of Lundby, 2/3-scale furniture was most often made from plastic. Houses were made from a variety of materials, including metal (tin litho), fibreboard, plastic, and wood.

In Germany during the middle part of the 20th century, 1/10th scale became popular based on the metric system. Toy-like houses coming out of Germany today remain closer in scale to 1:10 than to 1:12.

In the 1970s, the standard for adult collectors became 1/12 scale (also called 1" or one inch scale, represented in the United States as 1:12). There is also half inch scale or 1/24th (1 foot is represented by 1/2 an inch), quarter inch scale or 1/48 (1 foot is represented by 1/4 of an inch), and "dollhouse for a dollhouse" (1:144). Half-inch scale was popular in Marx dollhouses in the 1950s but only became widely available in "collector" houses after 2002, about the same time that even smaller scales became more popular. These smaller scales are much more common in the United States than in Britain.

The largest common size for dollhouses is "Playscale" or 1/6 which is proportionate for Barbie, Ken, Blythe and other dolls 11 - 12 inches tall.

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