| We collect antiques and memorabilia about the Great Pyrenees. The breed is also known as the Pyrenean Mountain Dog and Le Chien De Montagne Des Pyrenees.
Our special collecting interests include Great Pyrenees books, historic photographs, and a variety of breed art work.
Old Great Pyrenees post cards, stud cards, statuary, pamphlets, brochures, pedigrees, documents, and letters are of collecting interest.
Many of our old Great Pyrenees items have "personal histories". Our good fortune in acquiring a number of historic Great Pyrenees items from important breeders and exhibitors makes collecting very meaningful!
For instance, rare breed books personalized by their authors or by their previous owners, interesting old letters by important exhibitors, hand-inscribed comments on old photographs, historic art done for prominent breeders, etc., makes breed item collecting fascinating!
Our library of Great Pyrenees books is rather comprehensive, and all important and relevant breed efforts are represented in all editions. Our favorites' bear the personalized inscriptions of their authors or their previous owners.
Some interesting and important Great Pyrenees references appear in the scarce and valuable works of early dog historians, scholars, and writers. Over many years we have acquired many of the better, early dog encyclopedic works, with their early Great Pyrenees references.
It is always exciting to locate unrecorded historic breed references, published in scholarly dog works of a century or two long past. One of our areas of breed historic study is discovering previously unrecorded references about the Great Pyrenees.
Also, we collect better antiquarian and cynogetic reference works, canine art books, and a variety of important breed books in many other breeds.
An emerging and exciting personal specialty is acquiring 19th and 20th Century photographs or better illustrations of the breed.
We have obtained a variety of photographs and illustrations that together represent a chronological pictorial history of the breed.
Antique prints and engravings that feature the breed are not plentiful, but over the years we have managed to acquire a small collection of early breed illustrations. These illustrations range from quite early in the 19th Century, through the mid-20th Century.
Old Great Pyrenees photographs are of particular interest. With years of research, good fortune, and the generosity of kind friends, we have assembled a modest collection of rather important breed photographs from the turn of the 20th Century up to and including the early 1960s.
The photographs range from the 1st European Reconstitution period early in the 20th Century, and continue through the USA Importation period.
That historical span includes the Dretzen and de Bylandt 1st Reconstitution period, the post Senac-Lagrange and Cazaux-Moutou 2nd Reconstitution period, through and including the Mary Crane Importation era. In plain English, around 1906-1940.
Recently our photographic collection grew to include some of the greatest Pyrs in the development of the breed in the USA. These photographs provide an important glimpse of some of the very best Pyrs of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.
That is the period during which breed type was set in America. The photographs include some of the most important Great Pyrenees of the Cote de Neige and Quibbletown Kennels.
These photographs represent a pictorial history of the roots of our personal breeding program, as we linebreed from Pyrs rooted in the best of the Quibbletown and Cote de Neige bloodlines.
The recent addition of a collection of Basquaerie photographs representing some of Mrs. Crane's Great Pyrenees from the 1940s and 1950s further expands our pictorial study of the breed in the USA.
Those photographs, together with a previous small Basquaerie photo collection, show the Basquaerie generations as they descent from Mrs. Crane's original breeding stock of prior years.
Our personal goal has been the preservation of Great Pyrenees items of historic significance in the history and development of the breed both in America and abroad.
Today there are but few serious breed collectors, breed historians, and breed preservationists around the world. The art of collecting, the study and research of Great Pyrenees history, and the preservation of breed history, are lost arts.
We always welcome the opportunity to discuss and obtain Great Pyrenees antiques and collectibles.
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