Producer unknown to us
A pair of leather dolls
Americas, United States
1904
Leather, sewn, fire decoration
Erich Hösel (professor and sculptor) probably acquired the leather dolls during his trip to the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904
Purchased by the museum from Herta Hösel in 1962
NAm 4778 a, b
This pair of dolls was made of machine-sewn, orange-brown leather. The clothing and faces were designed using fire decoration. The back of each doll bears the inscription “World’s Fair, 1904.” They are most likely souvenirs from the St. Louis World’s Fair, also known as the “Louisiana Purchase Exposition.”
Erich Hösel (1869–1953) was a Saxon sculptor who worked at the Porcelain Manufactory Meissen for many years. On a business trip to the United States in 1904, he visited the St. Louis World’s Fair, which celebrated the westward expansion of the United States beginning in 1803. While there, he attended “ethnological expositions” and a lifelong artistic interested in Indigenous North America was sparked. On this trip, he acquired a number of ethnographic objects of Indigenous communities and subsequently became active in German networks of collectors, for example, in the Karl May Museum in Radebeul. By purchasing a large part of his estate in 1962, the Leipzig Museum was able to partially replace its wartime losses in the North America collection.
Frank Usbeck