Honestly, who doesn’t like owls? (well…probably rodents) Owls have been a hugely popular collecting genre for ages, and Cybis depicted them several times in porcelain. The Cybis owl that shows up in countless collections and online sales is their iconic Baby Owl which was introduced in 1957. This adorable owlet is the longest-running sculpture that [...]
The Limnettes were a unique product of the Cybis studio during the first half of the 1970s. They are small porcelain plaques that were designed by freelance artist George Ivers in 1971. He was actually working for Lenox at the time but later joined Cybis as their Art Director in 1973 and remained in that [...]
From a collector’s point of view, the issue size of a limited-edition item is of major importance; it’s therefore disconcerting if the artist or manufacturer plays fast and loose with that particular attribute. The concept of marketing retail items as “limited editions” didn’t become widespread until the 1960s. The Boehm Porcelain studio was one of [...]
Although I’ve never been a fan of Cybis’ Hall of Fame series of replicated “legacy” sculptures, I’ve always been curious about how they managed to produce identical but downscaled versions of pieces whose original molds were supposedly destroyed decades ago. So, I decided to learn how the upsize/downsize process actually works. In my quest to [...]
It is a shame that, throughout the history of art porcelain, it was so rare for public credit to be given to the artists and artisans who actually produced these beautiful objects. Even collectors who focused on the work of one particular studio almost never knew who was actually responsible for the existence of the [...]
Inveterate Cybis collectors may also be interested in the different display signs that the studio made available to their retailer network. The stores/shops would have purchased these from the studio through their Cybis regional sales representative, and it's likely that they were on display in the sales reps' showroom as well. Update, April 2025: An [...]
This charming trio of separate but related Cybis porcelain sculptures is based on Longfellow’s classic poem The Children’s Hour about his three young daughters. Indeed, Cybis captions this photo within their 1979 catalog Porcelains that Fire the Imagination as “The Children’s Hour Group”. However, they were each sold separately as Alice, Allegra and Edith (shown [...]
Cybis had differing motivations when it came to doing color variations on certain sculptures, and it can cause considerable confusion when seeing (or selling) them in the secondary market. This is because a color variation may have been done for any one of several purposes. (Note: This article does not apply to the Hall of [...]
Way way back in the Dark Ages B.E. (Before eBay), there were only two avenues for selling a piece of Cybis porcelain if you weren’t a retailer who was part of the Cybis Studio’s dealer network: You either placed an advertisement in the classified-ads section of a newspaper, or if you had a working relationship [...]
I have received many inquiries from people asking for advice on pricing or valuing a piece of Cybis that they have received or wish to sell, and they sometimes asked why there is no indication of the actual current market value in my description of each piece in the Archive. For several years, the simple [...]
THE CYBIS ARCHIVE 