American Brown-Complexioned "Witherspoon Rag Doll"

Live Auction

12" (30 cm.) Brown cotton doll with flat-dimensional face, oil-painted features, outlined brown eyes with white eye dots, defined nose, brows and lips, stitch-jointing at shoulders and hips, original costume. Condition: generally excellent. Comments: Maud Witherspoon Rag Doll Manufacturing Company of New Orleans, circa 1900; the Witherspoon family, past owners of the Ellington Plantation in St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, had ancestral ties to both the Confederate Army and civil rights advocates. Maud Witherspoon founded the doll company in order to support her widowed mother and younger sister (Cora Witherspoon, a noted American stage and film actress whose career spanned 1905-1954). Maud was described in the 1901 Indiana Weekly as a "gentle fragile girl thrown on her own resources who...noting the craze for all things Southern" determined to manufacture the very cloth dolls that she had made for pleasure while "still a mere chit of a girl" growing up in the French quarter. Value Points: rare doll with original paper label.