Diorama

11/13/2011

 
Picture
on sale at Bond and Bowery
I was terrified of dolls and dollhouses when I was little, so I would have found these Victorian butcher dioramas to be incredibly fucked up, with their tiny, blood-stained aprons and inside-out, hanging carcasses. But they're actually quite cute, no?

One lot note indicates that the dioramas may have been for educational purposes, since the meat cuts are so accurate, but another suggests it was fashionable for Victorian shopkeepers to display a diorama of the shop itself when it was closed, so people knew what they could find there the next day. In either case it's not a toy, but it should be!
Picture
sold by Christie's for, ahem, $26,742
Picture
private sale, £1,300
Picture
from the Edinburgh Museum of Childhood
 


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