Figure maker
Madame & George Pinxy Larson
making figures 1916 – 1948
A husband-and-wife shop working right through the golden age, and one of the very few in this record with a woman's name on the door.
Madam Grace Pinxy and her husband George Larsen made figures from 1916 to 1948. The Uncle Sam figure attributed to George Larsen was used by Stanley Burns. George Pinxy Larson also took Finis Robinson under his tutelage and taught him to build.
The collection places them as contemporaries of Frank Marshall and Ken Spencer, working through the years when Edgar Bergen's success pulled every American builder toward the same two faces. Both show up in their output here: a full-size figure in Charlie McCarthy's likeness, and a late-1930s Mortimer-style figure that unusually has moving eyes and a rolling winker, where the original Mortimer's eyes were fixed and cockeyed.
One Pinxy figure has a living mouth, which the collection notes was rare for an American builder at the time.
Larson or Larsen
Our sources spell the surname both ways, sometimes on the same site, and we have found nothing that settles it. The heading here uses the collection's own label.
The mechanics
Slot jaw with side-to-side moving eyes and, on some, raising eyebrows and a rolling winker. Carved wooden hands and legs, glass eyes, crepe hair.
The figures
1 photograph across 1 cataloged object. Each object is one entry in the register — where a character name covers two physical figures, they stay two entries, because the character outlives the object more often than the record admits.
Harlie McCarthy 1 photograph
- Materials
- glass eyes
- Movements
- slot jaw / moving mouth
