One of the Cybis studio’s ‘new’ retail introductions during the 1990s was a decorative piece titled Cupid Bowl, Original Famous Cybis Award. However, I recently discovered that its first appearance – like many of their 1990s-2000s offerings – took place decades earlier. It has been very interesting to dissect the chronology of this particular design. [...]
This is a companion (or ‘brother’?) post to my 2018 Cybis Bonnet Girls. While compiling this I was surprised to discover that there were almost three times as many males wearing headgear (30) as females (11)! And that is without including any crowned Cybis figures or any of the North American Indians (because I feel [...]
Back in the heyday of art porcelain collecting, most purchasers belonged to one or more of three general categories: (a) They bought whatever sculptures they liked, budget permitting; (b) they focused mainly on certain genres, which the Cybis studio termed ‘Collections’ – more about those in a future post; and/or (c) they made their purchase [...]
Having previously looked at the pairs, companions, and sets that the Cybis porcelain studio produced, it’s also interesting to see what I call their ‘two-fer’ and ‘trio’ pieces. These are sculptures that have more than one subject, both (or all) being of equal design weight/importance. There was also one sculpture that was composed of four [...]
An interesting characteristic of quite a few Cybis porcelains, especially those that were introduced during the 1950s and 1960s, was the option to purchase them either as white bisque or ‘color’, meaning hand-painted bisque. Before taking a look at how the white versions compared to their decorated counterparts, I should explain that “white bisque” means [...]
It was rather a surprise when I recently realized that between the Cybis and Cordey studio operations, they produced 15 ducks in various designs and iterations from the early 1950s until the end of the 1980s. I honestly hadn’t thought that ducks were that big of a deal at Cybis, but they actually outnumber the [...]
A recent observation by a sharp-eyed Archive reader regarding the sculpture Cree Indian ‘Magic Boy’ and its two Cybis editions has blossomed into a fascinating in-depth examination of this particular piece’s production history. It turns out that this design has had a rather unique ‘life story’ in several respects! The first unusual thing about ‘Magic [...]
Now that we’ve finished butterfly-catching, why not do some ‘crown-collecting’? Cybis used a crown in 41 different sculptures, plus one honorable-mention piece – but, somewhat surprisingly, only 16 of those items were depictions of royal persons. We can divide the crowned Cybis sculptures into five general categories: male royalty, female royalty (more or less), ballet [...]
The Cybis archive 