As an occasional buyer of vintage Bakelite jewelry, I've always wondered why Scottie dogs were such popular subjects for brooches. Were they just easy to represent with relatively crude carving?
As this silver brooch, another from Deja-voodoo.com, demonstrates Scotties weren't just a Bakelite subject. They were popular in all sorts of media in the 1930s and 1940s. Why? Ellen Solway, who owns Deja-voodoo with her husband, supplied the obvious answer: Fala. Much more famous than Checkers or Bo, FDR's Scottie was so important to the president's public persona that a sculpture of Fala appears on the Roosevelt Memorial in D.C. The fame of Scotties lingered long enough to affect me as a first grader in early 1967, even though I'd never heard of Fala. Assigned to write about my dog, or the dog I would have if I had a dog, I decided my theoretical pet would be a Scottie. (A huge fan of The Wizard of Oz, I probably thought Toto was a Scottie.)
I asked Ellen about what attracts vintage-jewelry customers to pet images and whether certain breeds of dog are particularly popular. Her reply:
Greyhounds, bulldogs, and poodles are very popular in dog jewelry. The Japanese particularly like poodle jewelry. However, we sell a lot more cat jewelry than dog! We have six cats and I think that personally I am more drawn to cat jewelry than dog jewelry. For collectors, cat jewelry is pretty generic while dog jewelry is more linked to a specific breed. I have sold some very glamorous and beautiful dog and cat jewelry, as well as some very cute and bizarre pieces.
The remarkably detailed silver head to the right is a working whistle meant to be worn as a pendant. The man who bought it, says Ellen, was "beside himself when he received it."
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