ManufacturerGerman
Hummel
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A small porcelain boy stands at a crossroads, knapsack over one shoulder, umbrella in the other, gazing down a path with the quiet certainty of someone who has never known doubt. This is perhaps the most recognizable silhouette in twentieth-century decorative porcelain: a Hummel figurine, born from the pen of a Franciscan nun and shaped in the kilns of a Bavarian factory town. Since 1935, these figures have traveled from the workshops of Rodental, Germany, into millions of homes, carried by a peculiar alchemy of spiritual innocence and commercial ambition.
Berta Hummel was born on May 21, 1909, in Massing, a small town in Lower Bavaria. The third daughter of a prosperous merchant, she showed an early and insistent talent for drawing. In 1927, she enrolled at Munich's State School of Applied Arts, placing second on the entrance examination despite being one of the youngest candidates. Her years in Munich were formative, steeped in rigorous instruction across life drawing, watercolor, oil painting, and textile design. But the pull of spiritual life proved stronger than the secular art world. On April 22, 1931, she entered the Convent of Siessen as a candidate of the Franciscan order, taking the name Sister Maria Innocentia.
Convent life did not diminish her art; it refined it. Teaching kindergarteners and designing ecclesiastical vestments, she began producing the pastel-toned sketches of rosy-cheeked children that would define her legacy: small figures picking flowers, playing instruments, trudging through rain, lost in the simple theater of childhood. Ars Sacra, a Munich publisher, printed these images as postcards that sold briskly across Germany and Switzerland. In late 1933, Franz Goebel, co-owner of W. Goebel Porzellanfabrik, encountered the postcards and recognized their potential as three-dimensional porcelain. Sister Maria Innocentia agreed to the collaboration on one condition: she would approve every figurine's color palette and form. The first Hummel figurines debuted at the 1935 Leipzig Trade Fair to immediate success.
The war years brought hardship to Siessen. Sister Maria Innocentia's health deteriorated steadily under the deprivations of wartime Germany, and tuberculosis took hold. She spent her final months sketching from a chaise longue, producing a series she called her "Last Gift" to the convent. She died on November 6, 1946, at the age of thirty-seven. The Convent of Siessen established an Artistic Board to oversee all future figurine production, a guardianship that continues to this day. Every Hummel figurine still bears the mark of that original covenant between sacred art and craft.
The postwar decades transformed Hummel figurines into an American phenomenon. U.S. soldiers stationed in West Germany sent them home as gifts, and the Army PX system made them widely available. By the 1970s, a speculator market had inflated prices dramatically. Early trademark pieces, identifiable by the style of the bee mark stamped on their bases, commanded thousands of dollars. The market cooled in subsequent decades, though rare pieces still reach impressive figures at auction. An "Adventure Bound" group has sold for over $4,000, and a rare "Signs of Spring" figure fetched $5,500 at a 2021 auction.
On Auctionist, Hummel figurines appear regularly across Nordic auction houses, with 128 items indexed, predominantly in the Ceramics and Porcelain category. Skanes Auktionsverk leads with 67 listings, followed by Limhamns Auktionsbyra with 26 and Auctionet with 8. Notable results include a "Here's my Heart" figurine at 2,224 SEK and a "Can I Play" piece at 1,921 SEK. A veteran moped branded "Hummel/Humlan" by DKW reached 7,000 EUR, a reminder that the Hummel name extends beyond porcelain in Nordic auction culture. For collectors, these figurines remain accessible entry points into mid-century European decorative arts, with condition and trademark period driving value more than any single design.