K&S Stock "Victorian"

General
This is another K&S design that mysteriously only has two issuers (Rising Sun Brewing of Elizabeth, NJ and William Gerst Brewing of Nashville, TN) that we are aware of. The design carries a 1911 copyright date, so presumably it was available well before prohibition shut down the industry. It is possible that K&S did not keep their stock designs available for as long a period of time as Meek/American Art Works did. Since we’ve never seen (or heard of) any type of K&S catalog or other supporting sales materials (orders, receipts, correspondence) it’s difficult to reliably speculate why this might be.

Like most of the “pretty lady” trays, this design is fairly simple; she is wearing an unpatterned shawl-like dress, holding a small goblet of beer without much other detail other than a gold (?) chain around her neck and a ring with an oval stone. She has an impressive pile of hair on top of her head, in keeping with the defining hairstyle for Edwardian women, the pompadour. In this design she appears to be sporting a full pompadour which is high, rounded and curved away from the head. Creating this shape meant backcombing and rolling a woman’s long hair into the desired form. Matted pads or rolls of hair (known as “rats”) were to support the hairstyle (see image below). They could also use a pompadour wireframe.

Somewhat unusual is her evident makeup, in particular the rogue on her cheeks. Though every woman desired to get the perfect look, in Edwardian times makeup was usually considered to be worn only by women of ill repute. Although many ordinary women wore makeup they kept it secretive by denying they were doing so, and rouge in particular was considered “illegitimate” (see image above). Also, they did not want to seem like they were taking treatments to increase their beauty. We are hard pressed to think of another stock design that so clearly indicates such obvious makeup usage.

Perhaps the design title hints at her being “lower class” as prejudice against eastern Europeans was fairly common. “Bohunk” (probably from Bohemian + a distortion of Hungarian) was a slur in common usage at the time referring to a lower-class immigrant of Central, Eastern, or Southeastern European descent. Originally referred to those of Bohemian (now Czech Republic) descent it began to be used toward most Central European immigrants during the early 20th century.

Size, Shape & Rim Style
All examples we’ve encountered are 12” straight-sided dishes with a woodgrain rim and small “engraved” gold or brass nameplate below the image of the woman that says, “Bohemia Girl” and another one above her head with the name of the advertiser. Advertising text does appear on the face of the design in an off-white color. One unusual feature on this design is the appearance of a production number in fairly large text that says “Serial No. 33,142”. While such production numbers appear on other K&S designs, the prominent nature of it in this design is perplexing.

Prices
There are only a handful of examples to draw from and Rising Sun examples outnumber Gerst examples by 4 to 1. Below average example generally bring low triple figures while average to above average examples range from the middle triple figure into the high triple figures. We do not have enough data