ORIGINAL DOROTHY DOUGHTY BISQUE BIRDS

Dorothy Doughty was an Italian born English ornithologist and sculptor.  She lived in England with her sister who was an art teacher.  She was born in 1892 and in the early 1930's was approached by Royal Worcester to sculp a series of birds based on Audubon's book "Birds of America".  The delicateness of her sculpture was not effective with the current slipcasting methods so RW hired artist Antonio Vassallo to come in and design a way to cast them all by hand.  Each series had no more than 500 pieces.  For every 10 painted editions, only 1-3 were left in their natural bisque form. This particular pair is very rare.  They were mounted on custom wooden bases and finished in white.   The gilt "W" is visible on the side but her signiture is on the bottom which cannot be seen because of the custom mount.  The MOMA in NYC has a vast collection of her smaller, later painted versions, but we haven't been able to find any sculptures comparable to these two large unpainted bisque versions.