Sieglinde Smith is glowing like the porcelain object in her hand. She gently puts it down and reaches for another, still wrapped in white paper.
Carefully, almost lovingly, Smith peels away the paper, as if she were removing a snowsuit from a sleeping infant. Out comes another rosy-cheeked child with impossibly long eyelashes, this one wearing Alpine apparel.
Sitting on a long table, the figurines are all sweetness and sentimentality. A peasant girl in a field with a chirping bird. A boy balancing a bottle of wine on a tray like a grown-up waiter. Four girls walking, grasping tiny bouquets of flowers. Each is several inches tall, except one that takes forever to unwrap: a 32-inch-high boy swinging on a limb in an apple tree.
He’s worth between $20,000 and $30,000.
“I wish I could unwrap them all for you because you would just be in total awe,” says Smith, who lived in Fort Worth for almost 30 years before moving to New Braunfels last year. She wanted to be closer to the museum where she expects the world to come and see her “babies.”
You’ve probably already seen them. Maybe you own one. They’re Hummel figurines and they adorn-some would say clutter-people’s mantels and curio shelves. They’re sold in fancy shops around the world. And here, hundreds are displayed at the year-old Hummel Museum in downtown New Braunfels, a German community about 45 miles south of Austin.
Four million people collect Hummels, which range in price from $75 to tens of thousands.
“The people who collect them are passionate,” said Ellen Epstein, president of Art Appraisal, Restoration and Consultation in New York.
“You grow on them, and they grow on you,” said Smith, special projects director at the museum.
About 1,100 of the Bavarian-style figurines, plates, plaques, dolls, bells and lamps were donated by Elizabeth Pedder, 82, a Los Angeles-area woman who began collecting in 1940. Now Pedder wants others to enjoy the “smiling children” she came to love. She did not want her $500,000 collection sold off piecemeal by her heirs.
“I had been trying to find a museum out here, but they all turned it down,” Pedder said from her Altadena home.
Part of the problem may be that many critics see the Hummels as kitsch.
Pedder learned of the museum in New Braunfels, and her Hummels found a home.
As much as Smith enjoys the figurines, it is the artwork that inspired them that she values most.
The figurines are based on drawings made in the 1930s and ’40s by Sister Maria Innocentia Hummel. The Goebel porcelain factory in Germany is the only place that makes the figurines. They carry the “M.I. Hummel” signature, also found on her drawings.
Smith, who grew up in Germany during World War II, was the model for at least two drawings: “Child With Enzian (or Bluebells),” commissioned by her father in 1942 when she was 18 months old, and “Sieglinde’s First Tree,” done later that year.
“The art is very spontaneous and there is an innocence about it,” said Epstein, the appraiser.
One of Hummel’s brothers told Smith his sister was born with a pencil in her hand. She sketched her playmates; later, she studied art.
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“She captured what a child’s essence was all about,” Smith, 52, said, noting the humor and innocence of the work done during the bleakest days of World War II.
The Hummel Museum boasts the world’s largest public collection of the Franciscan nun’s drawings-352 of an estimated 600. The rest scattered far and wide after Hummel died of tuberculosis in 1946 at age 37.
The figurines, produced since the late 1930s, became popular in the United States when American GIs brought them home for less than $1 apiece.
Museum President S.D. David and business leaders expect the museum to put New Braunfels on the map.
“We’re always looking for things that will give us a year-round tourist attraction,” said Chamber of Commerce President Tom Purdum. The Hummel Museum attracts bus tours all year and draws 2,000 visitors a month.
Pedder’s donation “certainly will give us national attention,” he said.
The museum also features a film of Sister Hummel’s life and rooms re-created to look the way they did when she used them: the chapel where she prayed, her convent studio and a classroom where she taught children art. Figurines are for sale in the gift shop.
Tours are given regularly. Sherri Ruben, a museum volunteer, said people sometimes have an emotional reaction to the art, especially when Smith is their guide.
“Sieglinde just brings it alive. I’ve watched her taking people through and they . . . get teary-eyed,” Ruben said.
The pictures “bring out something locked inside-a memory, a child they saw,” Smith said. “They make you chuckle. They make you happy and they make you sad. And always” in the drawings, she added, “there is hope.”
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For more information, call the museum at 210-629-4866.