I have a large porcelain doll that appears to be from the Victorian era. I need to find out who made it and what is its value. The doll has no tags. Any help is appreciated.
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Undress the doll and look for marks on the back of the neck, back and bottom of feet
She is very pretty!
I am relatively new to formal doll identifying, just been admiring, and if I saw something that really tickled my fancy, collecting since I was a child (so MANY years).
Have you also checked the bottoms of her feet, back of the neck, under the hair, the scalp, and small of her back for marks? Sometimes they are small and unobtrusive.
Without marks, trying to figure out who she is will be a challenge, but it isn't impossible. It will take a lot of work.
Some suggestions I have are to:
-- show her to everyone you know and put her on other doll websites as everyone has their own little niche and someone may recognize her immediately. This one is a little bit of a challenge because there have been millions of dolls made around the world...and finding the right person the first time out is a little like finding a needle in a haystack :(
--do some nosework by going to Google images and type in her description, like the height, hair color, dress style etc. to piece together info.
You can do this same type of search in eBay to learn more by reading posts.
You can do things to figure her age...like detemine if the hair is human or synthetic (human is USUALLY, but not always used in OLDER dolls) by burning a strand:
This YouTube video talks about that. www.youtube.com/
You can try to see what she is stuffed with (always risky because you don't want to damage), but typically really old dolls were stuffed with things like sawdust or cotton (not modern synthetic materials like poly fiber fill or foam pieces)
You can try to figure out of the body is porcelain or bisque:
en.wikipedia.org/
A couple of my favorite sites are below that may be useful to you, although some seem to recently have broken links:
www.thesprucecrafts.com/
antiques.lovetoknow.com/
There are also a list of doll museums that I have been considering putting my my bucket list to call to see if they help with identifications.
www.thesprucecrafts.com/
When it comes to valuing her, once you find an exact match, you can go to eBay's sold section and see what her current market value is--only use SOLD auctions, not current as people can ask anything they want, VALUE is what they actually PAY for something.
Also remember if you are going to sell her VALUE is different from PROFIT. eBay, ETSY etc. have fees and take a goodly chunk of sales so profit will be VALUE minus fees!
Hope this helps get you started!
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