Louis Grannat

Grannat made figures and sold them to the public from a shop in Brooklyn, New York, around the turn of the twentieth century. Most antique dealers meeting one today would call it rare folk art, which is not wrong so far as it goes, but these were commercial ventriloquist figures from a working maker.

They are extremely hard to come by. Beyond the examples here, the collection's notes identify two Grannat figures at the Vent Haven Museum: Tommy Baloney, the very first figure W. S. Berger bought and one of his four favorites, and a second called Wynnychuck Boy.

One example here has a provenance worth having. It was John Schaibley's first ventriloquist figure, bought around 1915 when he was about fifteen, before he moved on to Mack and Marshall figures; it came with ten of his travel diaries covering 1921 to 1932, the raw material for his book Memoirs of a Ventriloquist.

The mechanics

Carved basswood heads with a leather moving mouth, horsehair wigs, carved wooden hands and a characteristic V-shaped wooden body, with arms and legs of cloth filled with sawdust and straw. Most have mouth movement only. One unusually equipped figure has a rolling-eye winker and a hand shaker, with the wire running down the arm into the carved hand — earlier than the collection expected to find that option.