Doll:Little Sweetheart

In 1909, the Max Schreiber, manager of the toy-and-doll sales for a Munich, Germany, department store, sought to invigorate the doll industry and boost dolls sales by inviting artists-he deliberately avoided established doll makers-to create new dolls. He asked only that these artists design dolls that look like the children who "played in the streets of Munich," not like the ubiquitous dolly-faced dolls that depicted romanticized faces of children with an exaggerated sweetness and innocence. A number of German artists and sculptors produced doll faces based on real children, and to make them more lifelike, the artists captured a variety of facial expressions in their dolls like laughing, crying, pouting, smiling, and sleeping. These first artist-rendered dolls appeared in public displays, and they started a new trend in doll making. Soon German doll makers offered similar, mass-produced dolls of bisque known as "character dolls."