I took a chance on this repainted Lefton Arabian stallion on eBay. The paint job looked meh but the mold is uncommonly nice for a Japan and I thought maybe I could spruce it up, or strip it back to OF.
When it arrived, the paint job is a flat "OF Sham" blood bay, done by what I assumed was airbrush with handpainted details. The paint is pristine, though, so I thought it was recent until I went back to read the listing and the seller said she had purchased it "years ago" from someone who didn't know anything about it.
I posted pictures to a few of my FB groups and a couple of long-time hobbyists said, "Hold up--do not mess with that horse." One of them had even saved pictures of it, probably from another eBay listing, in 2002, which rules out it being a recent paint job! (She also had pictures of a matching Classic Arabian mare and Foal--I don't know if they were original Hagen-Renakers or Breyers--in the same color.)
Their theory is that it might be a very good spray-can repaint in a style very similar to that of a woman named Jo Maness, from the 1970s, although I've confirmed that it's not her work. Good spray-can paint jobs used to be pretty common--model horse people are nothing if not extremely resourceful--as did repainted chinas in the days when pretty-good china molds were easy to get and comparatively less expensive than they are now, and when so few molds were available overall that they were an attractive body option.
Comments