Doll

Proprietor of the Humpty Dumpty Doll Hospital in Redondo Beach, California, Emma Clear is known among doll collectors for the high-quality reproduction parian, china, and bisque head dolls she made in the 1930s through the 1950s. Clear reproduced popular doll heads from 19th-century German potteries and made her own distinctive cloth bodies and china or bisque limbs for them. For her first offering, she re-created a 1850s doll of Jenny Lind, known the world over as the Swedish Nightingale. Clear's best-known bisque dolls include her likenesses of George and Martha Washington. Clear always signed and dated her dolls, and collectors of discerning tastes have come to appreciate the quality of Clear's reproductions as much, if not more than, the German originals.