Index of American Design / Toy Rocking Horse

Poster / Roy R. Behrens (2023)

 

Index of American Design / Toy Circus Wagon

Poster / Roy R. Behrens (2023)

 

Index of American Design / Dappled Toy Horse

Poster / Roy R. Behrens (2023)

a cart, a ball, and two boxes of wooden bricks

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Above Roy R. Behrens, Cavern (© 2021). Digital montage.

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John Ruskin (Victorian-era writer and art critic), Prataerita [Of Past Things], 1899—

…I was never permitted for an instant [as a child] to hope, or even imagine, the possession of such things as one saw in toy shops. I had a bunch of keys to play with, as long as I was capable only of pleasure in which glittered and jingled; as I grew older, I had a cart, and a ball; and when I was five or six years old, two boxes of well-cut wooden bricks.

With these modest, but, I still think, entirely sufficient possessions, and being always summarily whipped if I cried, did not do as I was bid, or tumbled on the stairs, I soon attained serene and secure methods of life and motion; and could pass my days contently in tracing the squares and comparing the colors of my carpet; examining the knots in the wood of the floor, or counting the bricks in the opposite houses; with rapturous intervals of excitement during the fillling of the water cart, through its leathern pipe, from the dripping iron post at the pavement edge; or the still more admirable proceedings of the turncock, when he turned and turned until a fountain sprang up in the middle of the street. But the carpet, and what patterns I could find in the bed covers, dresses, or wallpapers to be examined, were my chief resources, and my attention to the particulars in these was soon so accurate that, when at three and a half I was taken to have my portrait painted by Mr. [James] Northcote, I had not been ten minutes alone with him before I asked him why there were holes in his carpet.

Harold Lloyd's walking wooden hobby horse

Above World Cinema poster depicting American film star Harold Lloyd (designer and date unknown).

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S. Howard Bartley, A Bit of Human Transparency. Bryn Mawr PA: Dorrance and Company, 1988, p. 73—

[Hollywood film star Harold Lloyd designed a wooden] walking hobby horse large enough for adults to ride…[It] looked much like a regular hobby horse except it was not on rockers. As the rider would lean forward the horse would tilt forward, pivoting (or rocking) on its front legs. This would lift the rear end of the horse and lift the hind legs off the floor. They would swing forward to reach what would now be the perpendicular. As the rider would then lean back, the front end of the horse would lift off the ground and in tilting back the front legs would swing to a new position. The pivot for this second phase of action (tilt) would be the hind legs. So as the rider would alternately tilt forward and backward the animal would carry its rider across the floor. 

Harold Lloyd in Safety Last (1923)

Froebel's Kindergarten | Documentary Film

Froebel's Kindergarten Gifts 2-6 (sets of wooden blocks)

Scott Bultman is a Michigan-based scholar and collector whose father manufactured educational toys, including the well-known wooden blocks (shown above) and other "construction toys" that were used in Friedrich Froebel's original kindergarten ("children's garden").

These are of increasing interest because it has been documented that "hands-on" experience of this kind was critical in the formative years of Frank Lloyd Wright (he repeatedly credited Froebel's blocks with enabling him to see gestalts, to look at the forest instead of the trees), as well as Buckminster Fuller, Le Corbusier and others.

Several years ago, the online fundraising initiative called Kickstarter was successfully used to reprint the best book on the subject, Norman Brosterman's Inventing Kindergarten. Now, Scott Bultman is hoping to use the same method to raise the funds to make a documentary film about Froebel, the history of kindergarten, and the manner in which it contributed to early childhood education. It's a great idea, and an effort worth supporting. To find out more, visit the project's Kickstarter link, which includes an informative video clip on the goal of this endeavor.

While exploring some of the pertinent links, we also unexpectedly found information about an exhibit (long since past, regrettably) of kindergarten-related artifacts, from Brosterman's collection. Reproduced below are two wonderful posters that advertised that exhibition, titled Learning by Design, at Northeastern University (Boston) in 2014.

See also: Roy R. Behrens, FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT and Mason City: Architectural Heart of the Prairie (2016).