Armand Marseille
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Armand Marseille was a company in Köppelsdorf, Thuringia, Germany, that manufactured porcelain headed (bisque) dolls from 1885 onwards.[1]
Köppelsdorf is a part of Sonneberg, in the Landkreis Sonneberg, in Thuringia 150 km (93 mi) due north of Nuremberg. For fifty years the wooded countryside formed the border between the two Germanys, Sonneberg lying in the GDR. Sonneberg was the centre of the German toy-making industry; it is the home of the German Toy Museum, many doll manufacturers and PIKO model railways.
History
Armand Marseille was born in 1856 in St. Petersburg, Russia, the son of an architect, and emigrated to Germany with his family in the 1860s. In 1884 he bought the toy factory of Mathias Lambert in Sonneberg. He started producing porcelain dolls' heads in 1885, when he acquired the Liebermann & Wegescher porcelain factory in Köppelsdorf. In 1919 the firm merged with Ernst Heubach but they separated in 1932. The combined firm was known as the "Vereinigte Köppelsdorf Porzellanfabrik vorm. Armand Marseille und Ernst Heubach".[2][3] Maximum production was 1000 dolls heads a day. Production continued to around 1930.[4]
