Wendy Lawton Pollyanna Art Doll

Description

Wendy Lawton Pollyanna art doll was inspired by Pollyanna by Eleanor Porter is the sensitive story of an orphan who managed to change an entire town with her sunny outlook. Wendy Lawton has created this 13″ all-porcelain version of Pollyanna, holding her crystal prism “rainbow-maker.” .This was the 5th design in the Classic Series by Wendy Lawton created in 1986 along with Anne of Green Gables and Laura Ingalls in an edition of 250 in her Turlock California studio.
Wendy’s work has garnered an impressive array of awards. In past years, Lawton dolls have been nominated for close to seventy industry awards, winning the coveted DOTY eleven times and the Dolls Award of Excellence three times.

This is #211 of 250

Most people recognize the name Wendy Lawton because of her dolls. For almost three decades she’s sculpted winsome faces out of clay to be molded for Lawton Doll Company’s award-winning limited edition porcelain dolls. In 2006, she was awarded the industry’s highest honor, The Lifetime Achievement Award. But if you ask Wendy, she’ll tell you she is a storyteller.“For most of my life I’ve been telling stories, she says. “Sometimes I tell a story in porcelain by creating a doll. At other times I tell the story using words.”

Every once in a while childhood and middle-age intersect. It’s like C. S. Lewis wrote to a young friend who was concerned about being too old: “…you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”

“As a child, I lived through my books,” Wendy says. “The characters became as real as my friends at school. I could walk blindfolded through the rooms at Mistlethwaite Manor and I knew the feel of the heavy velvet draperies covering Colin’s mother’s portrait. The chalk dust itched in my nose as Anne did her penance at the blackboard. Stuffing rags in the old cracked stove at the Pepper household, I could almost feel the heat escaping. I delighted when the cheeky little beggar showed up in Sarah’s attic room and I wept in that other upstairs bedroom as Beth hovered close to death.”

There is something about the reading we do as children that stays with us forever. It’s one of the reasons the dolls Wendy creates are always so closely aligned with literature and the books she writes are steeped in sensory detail. Wendy received honorary Doctor of Arts and Letters degree.

Besides working with dolls and books, Wendy loves to garden. Before she moved from her last garden, she counted over 200 rose bushes. She enjoys cooking and entertaining as well.

Wendy has been married more than 35 years to her best friend, Keith. They are parents to three adult children —

Wendy Lawton