A sad Schoenhut doll

 

This is a lovely 16" carved hair girl who has arrived with some of her siblings to get improved upon.

She has been repainted in the past and the repaint is failing.....cracking and flaking off. Parts of her original paint has failed too as you can see bare wood in spots.

You can also see that she once had blue eyes.

The brown paint on her left eye is flaking off a bit revealing a previous paint layer.

On the back of her head you can see bits of original hair colour wher the overpaint has flaked off.

The overpaint looks....moldy?

Off comes a layer of paint.....only to reveal another layer of stuff over the original paint. This stuff is hard like gesso but also needs to come off as it is failing quite badly.

It is a slow go to scrape the gesso remnants off.

Here you can see original paint emerging in the hair. 

Unfortunately there is not much, if any original paint left on the face and neck. The pink is still the gesso layer that is warping, cracking and flaking off.

A full blue eye has emerged from under the brown eyes she arrived with.

But, as the gesso comes off, there are brown eyes under the blue.

And, under those brown eyes, are blue eyes again!

This doll has had the colour of her eyes changed 3 times. Each layer of paint plus the gesso filled in what were once deep intaglio eyes.

This picture may look pretty scary but in a different light.....

Look at the depth of those eyes!

Even the modelling of her mouth is becoming more defined as the layers come off.

Here she is with all the non original layers removed.

The only bits of original paint left are a few patches of hair.

New paint done.

Her body had a respectable abount of original paint left under the moldy looking overpaint.