Time was in short supply this week, but I managed to carve out some moments to draw this fantastic set of cat skittles by Steiff, which dates from between 1897 and 1903. It is yet another plaything to add to the collection from 1890-1910, joining Shoe Doll, Skipping Girl Bank, the Missing Baby Penny Novelty, the Headless Suffragette, Pumpie the Elephant, our Toy Car, and the Toy Cradleboard.
One thing I love about these skittles is that each cat seems slightly different – I am not sure that was the intention, but perhaps the way in which they were made meant that variations occurred as the stuffing settled into the felt and they got knocked about.
I am fascinated by how smart they look – those red coats and ribbons! – and how well they were made. I’ve struggled to come up with anything made today that comes close to the ‘special toy’ feeling that this evokes. The auction photographs include a glossy red apple, which I initially understood as being one of its original balls. I had already started drawing it when I noticed that it only appears in one of the photographs of the auction, and the site does not include any information on the apple ball. I would be surprised if the auctioneers had photographed something that was not included in the lot, but I have not been able to find out any more information. The other sets of Steiff skittles I have come across appear to have regular balls.
Steiff made many variants of their skittles sets – aside from cats, there were dogs, monkeys, rabbits, elephants, bears, and even some beautifully colourful chickens, with a cockerel as their kingpin. According to a Steiff enthusiast, in Europe they were sold as sets of nine skittles, whereas the sets included ten in the US, marketed as tenpin bowling sets.
The set I most often came across in my Internet browsing is one including a selection of different animals (see here for instance). If you look closely, the shape of these animals is often basically the same except for their ears and different degrees of protrusion for their muzzles. When I saw the rabbit pins, I was reminded of Steiff’s lovely Peter Rabbit toy (1904) – they seem to use the same pattern, with the animals on their hind legs in a begging pose. For contrast, take a look at Steiff’s Peter Rabbit sold today – it is quite a different toy in several ways, as it seems to be based on the recent films rather than Beatrix Potter’s drawings.
Peter Rabbit was published in 1893, only a few years before these skittles appeared. The approach to the design of these animals does remind me rather a lot of Potter’s books – it manages to balance a degree of accuracy in terms of ‘animalness’ with a very pleasing anthropomorphic quality, evoking a world of fiction in which it seems natural to imagine them talking or engaging with you in some way.
Steiff has always been best known for producing soft toys and, especially, teddy bears like Hans Butzke’s, and continues to specialise in these to this day. Their current website includes cuddly bears and other soft animal toys, very high end ‘riding animals’ (a lion, a bear or a pony), as well as some wooden baby toys and some hand puppets. I found it surprising to see they have also branched out into children’s fashion.
Looking back, it seems Steiff used to make a wider range of toys including offerings that might described as more characterful. They have always had an interesting, wide variety of animal species on offer as stuffed toys, but it seems that they might have produced ‘character’ animals more frequently in the past – for instance, take a look at this velvet bulldog, or this smartly dressed one here.
Their current stuffed animals seem generally softer and sometimes floppier, due partly to health and safety regulations as well as to the availability of different soft, hard-wearing materials for the stuffing and the fur. The way in which their lines stray from ‘accuracy’ reflects design trends today, as it did in the past. But it is interesting that I perceive some of the current designs as focusing less on creating characters or worlds, and more on producing something velvety and sweet that might serve as a good source of comfort, with a neutral, agreeable expression.
It made me think about what might have changed in the qualities people look for in toys. This set of skittles is playful and is an active participant in a child’s play, in the sense that there is already some sort of story in them, regardless of whether or not one chooses to pick it up and go with it. Some of the cats look a little grumpy, others look a bit bewildered, others look possibly peckish. Together they make for a wonderful group – the kingpin is a bear figure with mohair fur, and is that a further cat kingpin or is it a ‘queenpin’?
It is very likely that making skittles like this now would be prohibitively expensive and a complete commercial flop. But I’d like to think that someone, somewhere, also finds these lovely and might consider it. Please? I’m on my hind legs here, bell a-jingling.