When I was a kid growing up in the '80s, my best friend lived across the street from me. As avowed horse girls, we hit it off right away when my family moved to Georgia in 1985 (ironically for this particular post, from Toledo, OH). We went to the same school, rode the same bus, took riding lessons at the same barn for several years, and we both collected and played with Breyers. At some point around 1986 or 1987, my friend was given a paint-by-numbers kit, but it wasn't just your standard 2D wall art. No indeed! It was a 3D model of an Arabian horse! I was vaguely aware at that time that adult model horse collectors resculpted and repainted their Breyers, but the notion of customizing one of my beloved carpet herd members horrified me. So this horse painting kit with a model deliberately made to be painted was about the coolest thing I'd ever seen. It came with the usual snap-lid paint tubs in several shades of black, white, and grey, plus some red for the halter. There was also a little brush, a tiny blending sponge, and some instructions on how to paint a dapple grey.
That afternoon, we sat at a picnic table under the giant, ancient live oak tree in her front yard and chatted about our lesson horses while she painted her model. She tried for a grey to begin with, but eventually went with solid black like the opinionated little mare she often rode in her lessons.
I did eventually get over my aversion to repainting perfectly good Breyers,
but I never forgot my friend's nifty painting kit horse. A few months after
she got her model, I was tagging along with my mom on a shopping trip to K-mart when I
spotted the same Arabian kit my friend had along with several other breeds including a walking
Thoroughbred and a standing Quarter Horse. I remember stopping to look
at them briefly, but we weren't in the store that day for toys or
crafts, so I had to hustle and catch up with Mom. I looked for them on subsequent trips to K-mart, but never saw them again.
Many years later, I finally stumbled across the Arabian kit again while idly cruising eBay, and I was delighted to finally
know the company name, Craft House of Toledo, OH. I was interested to see that
they had made a variety of breeds besides the three I knew of---there
was also a Clydesdale, a Pony of the Americas, a Shetland, a foal, and a
unicorn. I have seen examples of all of them now except the foal and
unicorn. (If anyone has photos of these, especially the foal or unicorn, please feel free to email me! I'd love to add them to this post.)
I
acquired a Clydesdale in a body lot ages ago, but I'm not sure if I
still have him somewhere. I did however deliberately buy an Arabian just
for the sake of nostalgia. I had planned to prep it properly and paint it a more realistic dapple grey, but I'm ridiculously sentimental, and I couldn't bring myself to do so. I'm sure a young horse girl somewhere spent many hours working on this (rather creditable) paint job, so I'm going to leave him be.
I've been wanting to acquire one of these kits new in the box for ages now so I could write up a proper post about them here, but the timing, the price, or the box condition was never quite right until just recently. I scooped up this nice Thoroughbred kit a week ago on eBay, and other than a missing paint brush, it's complete.
The horse is about the size of a Breyer Classic scale model, and it's molded from some sort of heavy plastic or resin. It's textured to supposedly suggest a wood carving, but it really just looks more like hair texture to me. Nonetheless, the horse kits came with both paint for a realistic color or several colors of stain in case you wanted to finish it like a wood carving.
Interestingly, the horse's belly is screwed to a cardboard tab attached to the back panel of the box, presumably to keep the horses in place in shipping. They are fairly heavy, and they would definitely tear through the flimsy cellophane on the front of the box with any rough handling.
The painting instructions are surprisingly detailed.
The instructions are copyrighted 1985 which coincides with when I saw the models in my local K-mart, and other collectors have corroborated seeing them in stores in the mid-to-late 1980s as well. They're a bit hard to find, so I suspect that they were only made for a few years. I see the Arabian, Quarter Horse, and Thoroughbred most often on eBay, and it makes sense that some of the most popular breeds in this country would also be the most appealing in model form. The Clydesdale, POA, Shetland, foal, and unicorn are much less common. Unfortunately, the models are not marked in any way, so if they're no longer in the original box, it can be hard to come up with the right search parameters to find them on online auction sites.
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| A Craft House Quarter Horse I spotted in a Nebraska antique mall a few years ago. (I should have bought him.) |
According to the back panel of my Thoroughbred box, the horse is a "reproduction of a wood carving by nationally known wildlife sculptor Ed Dietz." Dietz is listed as the sculpting artist for the Arabian, Thoroughbred, and Quarter Horse, and while I don't have pictures of the back panels of the boxes for the other breeds, I would guess he sculpted those as well. The side panels of the boxes have pretty accurate renderings of the other models.
Though
Craft House only seems to have made model horses in the 1980s, the
company's relevant history really began in 1950 when Max Klein, owner of
the Palmer Paint Company in Detroit, MI, hired freelance commercial
artist Dan Robbins to "[devise] a hobby kit that would promote the sale
of Klein’s paint products. Robbins based his concept on Leonardo da
Vinci’s practice of numbering sections of his canvases for apprentices
to complete. After trial and error, Robbins’ painting kits became
arguably the most loved—and most vilified—hobby of the 'new leisure
class' of 1950s Americans." [1] The idea of a
paint-by-number kit was first patented in 1923, but the Palmer Paint
Company brought the concept to life in the 1950s by the sheer volume of
kits they designed and produced.
In 1956, brothers John and A. M.
Donofrio bought the company and moved it to Toledo, OH, renaming the
company Craft House. [2] In addition to
their traditional 2D paint-by-number kits and eventually paint-your-own model horse kits, the
company also sold bisque figures to paint or glaze, stain glass
lampshade kits, model dogs and duck decoy painting kits, and so much
more. You can flip through the pages of one of their catalogs from circa
1975 here:
https://www.paintbynumbermuseum.com/catalog/13031
Craft
House products were originally made in the USA, but like so many
companies, they eventually had to outsource some of their production to
Hong Kong. In 2006, they were bought out by a company called Chartpak,
and they now operate out of a Craft House satellite office in
Massachusetts. They still make paint-by-number kits and other arts and
crafts kits for children.
My Craft House kit still has the original K-mart price tag---it retailed for $4.97 in the mid-1980s. These days, they sell for around $20 new in the box on eBay. Did anyone reading this have a Craft House horse kit back in the day? Did you paint it? If you're willing to share pictures of them, painted or otherwise, with or without boxes, I would love to see them! You can email me at mumtazmahal (at) gmail (dot) com
Citations:
1) Remembering Dan Robbins, a tribute and obituary by the 20 North Gallery
2) Toledo Blade, Novermber 23, 2004, article about downsizing at Craft House office in Toledo, OH
(Too tired for proper MLA citations today.)
