Friedrich HEYN (1849-1928). Prancing merry-go-round horse in - Lot 12

Friedrich HEYN (1849-1928). Prancing merry-go-round horse in polychrome lacquered wood with colored glasses, sulfur eyes, horsehair tail. H: 136; W: 122 cm (restorations and repaints) Biography: Founder of the self-taught German school of fairground art, Friedrich HEYN began his career by sculpting his first wooden horses alone. In 1870, he founded a factory for merry-go-round horses and objets d'art in Molbitz, a village near Neustadt. The workshop grew rapidly, and by 1880 had more than thirty workers. It then moved to Neustadt, employing up to 100 people. The factory offered complete merry-go-rounds, whose decorative elements could also be ordered separately. Customers were offered a wide variety of subjects, from the most common animals to the most exotic, as well as gondolas, chariots, carriages, cars... His talent lay in the fine craftsmanship of his sculptures, the elegance of the decorations chosen and the beautiful polychromy used. In his catalog, Heyn presented five prancing horse models and one jumping horse model, from the simplest to the most elaborate, each available in twelve formats. Heyn's horses can be recognized by morphological features characteristic of his work: straight muzzle, geometrical nose tip, double facial veins, open mouth revealing tongue and teeth, split toupee between forward-pointing ears, sulphur eyes and, above all, a carved lion's head in the form of a brass cabochon on the chest. At the end of his career, Friedrich Heyn sold his company to one of his colleagues, Richard Keime. The company ceased trading completely at the end of the 1950s, under the constraints of East Germany's socialist regime. Fredrich Heyn remains one of the leading fairground artists of the 19th century. Bibliography: Fabienne and François Marchal :L'art forain (Editions de l'amateur, 2002)