Hagen-Renaker (California): 1945-2021

August 2024 Addendum: Since there has been some confusion lately about the state of Hagen-Renaker, I just wanted to clarify how things stand as of August 2024. The Hagen-Renaker factory in California closed at the end of 2021, but the company itself continues to produce ware in Tennessee under the ownership of Kristina Lucas. When Sue Nikas passed away in June 2022, she officially left the company to Kristina to carry forward into the future.  At the moment, HR TN is producing small runs for collectors, but there are plans for larger giftware editions in the future. 

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At the end of this year, Hagen-Renaker will be closing its California factory for good after 76 years in business. It's the end of an era. While I am terribly sad about this news, it's not entirely unexpected. I've known for some time that there was no one else in the younger generations of the Renaker family interested in continuing the business when the present owners retire, and material and labor shortages during the pandemic have only hastened an inevitable end. (Before anyone panics too much, Hagen-Renaker Tennessee will continue to produce Hagen-Renakers under an official license from the family, a pretty amazing silver lining! More on that later in the post though.)

Hagen-Renaker has offered an amazing array of products over the course of their remarkably long history. In the model horse community, they are of course best known for the incredibly beautiful and lifelike horses sculpted by Maureen Love. Hagen-Renaker produced many other animals, both large and small, like the handsome Pedigree Dog line sculpted largely by Tom Masterson, as well as a variety of domestic and wild animals and even fantasy creatures. The comedic arts of Don Winton, Nell Bortells, Martha Armstrong Hand, and Helen Perrin Farnlund were put to excellent use with the Disney and Little Horribles figurines, and even Moss Renaker, mother of company founder John, designed pieces as well. 

Hagen-Renaker began in 1945 in the garage of John and Maxine (née Hagen) Renaker in Culver City, CA. The company started by making simple dishware and shadow boxes, but they quickly found that the real bread and butter of the pottery business was small ceramic animals, both realistic and whimsical.

An early Hagen-Renaker butter pat (photo by Sarah Wellman)

A handsome couple I like to think of as Elizabeth Bennett
and Mr. Darcy (early Hagen-Renaker shadow boxes)

An early Miniature lamb

Early Miniature chickens

In the boom years of the early 1950s, Hagen-Renaker moved their production to several buildings in Monrovia, CA. This added space allowed them to branch out and add the larger scale Designer's Workshop line to their production. It featured exquisite horses...

many different dogs...

clowders of cats... 

a variety of domestic animals like chickens...

and much, much more. 

The 1950s also saw the introduction of the Disney line, considered the finest 3D renderings of Disney characters by Walt Disney himself, as well as other imaginative designs like Black Bisque, faux-stone plaques, the Zany Zoo, and the Little Horribles.

A sampling of Black Bisque pieces (photo by Sarah Wellman)

Double horse plaque designed by Maureen Love

Zany Zoo lion

By 1960, however, competition in the form of cheap unauthorized copies from Japan nearly put Hagen-Renaker out of business. They were forced to lay off the majority of their artists, and the company limped along with a skeleton crew. In about 1966, sales and consequently production began to pick up again, and the company moved 15 miles east to San Dimas, CA, where they had more room to expand. Though both the Miniature and Designer's Workshop lines continued at San Dimas, the decoration style was simplified to be more cost efficient. Pieces in the DW line at this time tended to have short production runs, so San Dimas pieces are often more rare than their Monrovia counterparts.

San Dimas Daisy in rare buckskin color 
(photo by Sarah Wellman)

San Dimas Ferseyn in rare steel grey color 
(photo by Sarah Wellman)

In 1980, Hagen-Renaker purchased the Freeman-McFarlin factory almost 100 miles south of their San Dimas location. This new factory had the space and facilities to devote to the production of larger scale ware, and some of the biggest and most spectacular DW pieces were made at San Marcos. 

Nataf, one of the largest DW horses at 12" tall

Sadly, the Designer's Workshop line was never as profitable as the Miniatures line which had remained in production at San Dimas. In 1986, the San Marcos factory was closed up and sold, and all production returned to San Dimas where it remained for more than 30 years. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Hagen-Renaker added the Specialties line, featuring slightly larger and more detailed sculptures than the usual Miniature pieces. They even experimented with stoneware finishes for a short time.

Stoneware birds

In 1993, Hagen-Renaker began to make a new line of small DW scale horses, beginning with Jamboree based on a sculpture Maureen had issued independently under the name Maureen Love Originals. A new sculpture for the line followed almost every year, and in 2000, Hagen-Renaker announced the return of the old DW horse molds in a fun variety of colors.

Jamboree issued in 1993 (photo by Sarah Wellman)

Encore issued in 1994

Reissue Large Zara in black produced in 2018

In Fall 2018, Kristina Lucas Francis opened Hagen-Renaker Tennessee, an officially licensed offshoot of the main company. Kristina learned the ceramics trade from HR-trained artists and their pupils, so I can't imagine a more perfect steward of the company's body of work. She has been producing small editions of DW and Mini pieces in exquisitely detailed colors for the last few years. As expected, the Hagen-Renaker Tennessee line has mostly consisted of horses so far, but Kristina has offered tantalizing sneak peeks of animal figurines coming in the future (and of course, the resurrection of the delightful Dead Bird as seen below).

Models produced by Hagen-Renaker Tennessee

Though Hagen-Renaker California will officially shut down in the next few weeks, Hagen-Renaker Tennessee will carry on. Kristina has already begun the process of moving a number of the molds to Tennessee, and she is offering exciting hints to members of the Hagen-Renaker Collectors Club, the best source for information on upcoming pieces. 

[2024 ETA: Sue Nikas sadly passed away about 6 months after I posted this blog, and she left the Hagen-Renaker company to Kristina, who moved everything needed for production from California to Tennessee. Hagen-Renaker is still a going concern there on a smaller scale, but the pieces produced continue to be extraordinary.]

Some Hagen-Renaker Tennessee pieces are only available to HRCC members, and membership is only $29 a year. Not only does it allow purchase opportunities for exciting new runs, but members also get access to the Hagen-Renaker Field Guide, bi-monthly online newsletters, a printed annual at the end of the year, and fun Hagen-Renaker swag (mugs, T-shirts, etc). The HRCC is doing a membership drive right now through December 15th, so if you have not already joined, I highly encourage you to do so. (And if you mention my name as the person who convinced you to sign up, I'd very much appreciate it!)

Jane Addiction: Been Caught Collecting*

I conga a handful of Breyer molds because it's reasonably affordable to do so, and acquiring interesting variations to fill out a particular collection can be lots of fun. (For example, I posted about my herd of dapple grey Proud Arabian Mares a while ago.) But conga collecting clinkies has never really been something I've pursued. Chinas tend to be quite a bit more expensive than your average plastic model, they're often much harder to find, and most were never released in a wide variety of colors and patterns like you see with plastic models.

Nevertheless, I seem to have sort of accidentally-on-purpose acquired a scurry of Hagen-Renaker Designers Workshop Jane (B-720) squirrels. Jane was masterfully sculpted by Maureen Love, and at a little over 5 inches tall, she's almost life size.

This inquisitive critter was first produced at Monrovia from spring of 1960 to fall of 1961 and again from fall 1965 through spring 1966. In spite of this fairly short production timeline, variations abound. The Monrovia production colors were glossy solid red with a bit of white on the muzzle and chest and matte grey with white highlights. Jane doesn't seem to crop up for sale very often, so the only Monrovia red I have seen is my own.

Two distinct versions of the Monrovia grey Jane exist. The first is a soft matte grey with glossy white highlights on the chin, chest, front legs, and tail. The amount of white varies from piece to piece.

My first grey Monrovia grey Jane came from the Hagen-Renaker archive sale. She has a Monrovia oval name sticker.

My next Jane was purchased from a fellow collector. She looks quite similar, but has slightly less extensive white on her underside and tail.

My third grey Jane came from the same collector, and she has much more extensive white on her legs and the side of her face, but she has almost no white at all on her underside. I believe that her decoration style may represent a transitional period between the earlier Janes above and the later ring-eyed Jane pictured below.

I don't know this for certain, but I am guessing this darker grey ring-eyed Jane dates to the second Monrovia production period from Fall 1965-Spring 1966. She lacks any white on her underside, and her heavy, dark grey glaze combined with the oddly ringed eyes look rather crude compared to the softer grey Janes above. If my dating of these color variations is correct, this later, somewhat cruder work coincides with a time when the HR factory was in the process of moving from Monrovia to San Dimas. Because she came from the collection of Karen Grimm, it was suggested to me that she might be a test, but I know of at least one other ring-eyed Jane pictured in the Charlton guide. (Does anyone reading this blog have a Jane like this?)

Jane was also produced at San Dimas from Fall 1969 to Fall 1972. She was again offered in glossy red but this time with white on the belly, legs, and face. She was also produced in a solid glossy grey color with lighter grey highlighting on the tail. The red squirrels varied a bit in the intensity of their red-brown color and in terms of how much white they have on the faces and legs.

San Dimas red #1: more white on face, less on front legs

San Dimas red #2: less white on face, much more on front legs

San Dimas grey

Despite being offered for a little over 6 years altogether, Jane is not a very easy piece to find. I imagine she might have been a challenge to mold, so it seems possible that production numbers were limited during the years she was available. Or, despite her charm, perhaps Jane simply didn't sell well. (I can't imagine why---she's adorable---but some people do view squirrels as pests.)

Mostly through luck, I have added a surprising assortment of test run Janes to my collection. The first two are from the Hagen-Renaker archives which were sold on eBay throughout 2015 after John Renaker passed away in November 2014.

This grey test Jane looks very much like the Monrovia release, but she has a completely white tail. She also has a great deal of white over-spray on her body under her tail that was not cleaned up before firing.

Jane was never officially produced at the San Marcos factory, but nonetheless, several tests from those short years in the 1980s do exist. This glossy solid white Jane also came from the Renaker estate archive sale.

A second glossy white Jane came out of the collection of a former employee and now belongs to my sister.

This glossy solid red Jane came from the same collection, and interestingly, it was cast in white slip rather than brown.

Likewise, this glossy solid black Jane from the same collection was also cast in white slip.

Probably the oddest Jane in my collection is this matte grey-ish brown critter. I found her on eBay from an Arizona seller for the bargain price of $6, and as you can see from the pictures, she has had a hard life. Based on the dirt caked into her crazing, I believe she must have spent some time outdoors, possibly as a garden or yard decoration as Maureen Love was wont to do with her creations.

She was poured in greyish-brown slip and has a bit of subtle shading to bring out the mold detail. But what is she? My first thought was that maybe she was a matte version of the San Dimas grey that escaped the factory without being glossed. But she is definitely not the same base/slip color as my glossy San Dimas grey Jane. And she doesn't match the slip color of my Monrovia matte grey Janes either. Maybe she was poured, either deliberately or accidentally, in the wrong slip color and then finished and sold or was taken home by an employee. Similar instances with other models are definitely known. Could she be a test? Maybe. I'll probably never know, but I think she's a pretty neat find even in her damaged state.

After Maureen Love passed away in 2004, many of the sculptures and sketches she kept for herself were dispersed by her family the following year on eBay. I was a poor grad student at the time, and I deeply regretted not having the means to purchase any of the art from her estate. Last fall, however, Maureen's granddaughter offered up several hundred more sketches on eBay. Given my Jane addiction, it should come as no surprise that this particular sketch came to live with me.

I have yet to get it framed (it's double-sided), but one of these days, it will hang next to a display of my Janes. And probably some other squirrels. I may have inadvertently started collecting more...

Monrovia Betty sculpted by Maureen Love

Monrovia Peggy sculpted by Maureen Love

Hagen-Renaker Mrs. Chatter sculpted by Robyn Sikking and brown baby
"Chat" mold probably sold by Robyn directly

* (with apologies to Perry Farrell, Dave Navarro, et al. Oh, who am I kidding. That was an amazing pun.)