Cold-Painted and Hand-Gilded Easter Rabbit Figure in a Pink Brimmed Hat and Blue Overalls, Standing on a Flowered Base with Eggs, Early to Mid 20th Century

The Piece

A small standing rabbit in a pink hat, carrying an egg, outlined in gold from the tips of his ears to the rim of the base he stands on.

He is dressed with some care. A wide-brimmed hat in coral pink, banded in pale blue and trimmed with a green sprig at the crown; a lavender neckerchief knotted at the back of the neck; a yellow jacket with rolled cuffs; and pale blue bib overalls with a buttoned chest pocket, the legs finishing below the knee over bare feet.

Tucked under one arm is a large egg, yellow above and green below with a gold band running round it.

He stands on an oval mound base worked as a patch of ground — green grass, small white and pink flowers, and a clutch of eggs in pink, lavender and green nestled in at his feet.

The gold is the technique that holds the whole thing together. A fine raised gold line has been run by hand along every edge on the figure: the ear tips, the hat brim and band, the muzzle, the neckerchief, the jacket seams and cuffs, the pocket, the overall hems, the toes, and a continuous zigzag all the way round the rim of the base.

The underside is flat, unglazed and undecorated, with a single small hole at the centre.

History & Provenance

The paint is the evidence here, and it is the kind that does not lie.

Look at how the colour sits on the figure. The cream of the face, the ears, the feet and the base is matte and dry, absorbed into the surface. The yellow, blue, coral and lavender of the clothes are glossy and stand proud, pooled slightly where the brush left them. The gold stands proud of both, a raised line laid over the top of everything else.

Three different surface behaviours on one figure is not a glaze. A glaze is fired into the body and comes out of the kiln uniform. What is on this rabbit is cold paint — colour applied to an unglazed body after firing, in enamel and lacquer, and left to dry rather than fired in.

Cold painting was the ordinary way to decorate a figure for most of the history of figure-making, and it is the reason so few early painted figures survive with their colour intact. It went out of use because it fails. Unfired paint wears away at every handled edge, and manufacturers moved first to fired underglaze and on-glaze decoration and later to colour moulded into resin precisely to stop it happening. Finding cold paint on a figure places it before that change rather than after it.

The wear is consistent with the technique. The colour has thinned at the muzzle and along the backs of the ears — exactly where fingers land when a figure this size is picked up — and the cream beneath shows through. That is how cold paint goes. Fired decoration does not wear that way at all.

The body underneath is unglazed and porous, and the flat underside has taken on the yellowed tone and the settled grime that a porous surface acquires over decades of shelf life and handling.

There is no maker's mark, no model number and no country of origin anywhere on the figure, and that is not evidence of recency. Marking decorative figures only became routine in the later twentieth century, and imported goods were very often marked with a paper label that has long since gone. Unmarked is the normal condition for a piece of this period, not the exception.

Dated on the decoration and the body rather than on style: early to mid twentieth century. Offered unattributed.

The subject is older still. Dressed rabbits carrying eggs have been made as Easter figures since the nineteenth century — in composition and papier-mache in Germany, in cast plaster in America, and in painted ceramic everywhere since. Putting the rabbit in a coat and a hat is a convention older than any maker currently producing them.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Easter decoration is almost entirely disposable, and this is what the opposite looks like — a figure that has already come out of the box every spring for the better part of a century.

That is the whole case for owning one. Paper, card and moulded plastic get replaced every few years. A figure like this gets put away with the good things and comes back out, and somewhere along the way it stops being decoration and becomes the thing the children look for.

At four and a half inches he sits comfortably where seasonal objects actually go — a windowsill, a hall table, a kitchen shelf, the middle of a table among eggs and branches, a mantel where he can be seen from the doorway.

The gold is what lifts him above the ordinary. Most painted Easter figures are flat colour and nothing else; the hand-run gold line here catches light on every edge, and it is a great deal more work than the piece strictly needed. The zigzag around the base is freehand, and the spacing wanders slightly, which is how you can tell a person did it.

The colours behave well, too. Coral, lavender, butter yellow and pale blue against cream is a proper spring palette rather than a nursery one, and it sits happily with white china, plain linen and green branches.

He makes a serious gift, which a new one never can — for a grandparent who sets a seasonal table, for a first Easter, or for anyone who keeps a shelf that changes four times a year and would rather it changed with something old.

A note on care, and this is the important part. The colour on this figure is surface paint, not glaze. Never wash it, never put it under a tap, and never wipe it with a damp cloth. Water and pressure take cold paint off, and it does not come back.

Do not soak it under any circumstances. The body is unglazed and porous and will draw water in through the hole in the base, which then takes days to dry and leaves a stain behind.

Dust it with a soft dry brush and nothing else. A brush reaches between the hat brim, the ears and the flowers where a cloth cannot go, and it will not drag at the paint or the gold.

Keep it out of direct sun, which fades unfired colour faster than almost anything.

Wrap him in tissue rather than newspaper for storage and pack him upright. The ears and the hat brim are the thin points, and they are what break in a box.