Robert Olszewski

(b. 1945)

Robert Olszewski was born in Pennsylvania, although he has lived in Camarillo, California, for the last forty years. As a young man, he originally hoped to make a career as a painter, and spent several years showing his pictures in shows and galleries. When one of his paintings was stolen from an exhibition, Robert replicated it in miniature to help the police track it down, an event that’s often credited with awakening his interest in small-scale work. That interest was intensified when he built a dolls’ house for his daughter in the early 1970s, followed by several other dolls’ houses ordered by friends. Robert’s career definitively shifted towards sculpture in 1977, when a chat with a dentist friend alerted him to the possibilities of the lost-wax method. He began to create tiny sculptures from metal which he then painted.

In 1979 he joined the firm of Goebel Miniatures, a sister company of the famous German porcelain firm. It would prove to be a rich partnership, providing the context in which Robert made several series of very popular figurines. There’s the Historical Series, the Americana series and the Wildlife Series, the Children’s Series, the Oriental Series and the Women’s Series, not to mention the more recent series in collaboration with Disney.

For those who want to find out more information about Robert’s works, I highly recommend the ‘bible’: The Goebel Miniatures of Robert Olszewski by Dick Hunt, published by the Collectibles Reference Press. I have the first edition, from 1989, but I think there have been further editions since. The catalogue gives dates, catalogue numbers and descriptions of Robert’s works, with information about the pieces that inspired him (where available), and details of how different castings or revisions can be distinguished. It’s an absolute must for specialist collectors of Robert’s works, but also really interesting for those, like me, coming at his work from the perspective of a broader miniatures collection.

Here are the works by Robert in the Quartermaine Hall collection so far: