German Girls' Toys: Prams /Puppenwagen


Figure 1.--Here we see two unidentified German children in a neautifully tunted cabinet card. . The studio was Paul Kühn in Chemnitz, located in Saxony. The portrait is undated, but the dealer estimated about 1900. We might guess the 1890s, (A German reader suggests the late-1890s.) The older child with the stick (or is it a drum stick) and pull horse is a boy. We are less sure about the child in the dress. The short hot suggests boy, but the doll and pram suggest a girl. A german readers suggests that such short hair on a girl this age was unsusual. I don't know if German prams were actually made like this.

Girls of course needed a pram to cart their dolls around. Boys had waggons (wagen) to cart all their treasures around. Girls wanted a little more sophisticated conveyance for their dollies. Girls wanted a conveyance that looked like a baby pram, just like the one their mothers used. The German term for a toy pram is Puppenwagen, meaning doll waggon. A real pram is a Kinderwagen. We are not sure when the first Puppenwagen was built. We so not see others in our snall collectioin of 19th century German portraits. We see many examples in the 20th century. They were done in a number of different styles and in different sizes.






HBC






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Created: 10:10 PM 4/21/2010
Last updated: 3:41 AM 4/22/2010