Every Brad Keeler Figurine We Can Account For: A Working Catalog

About this catalog

Everything below is the reading matter: where the catalog came from, how the numbering works, where to find the mark, and how to avoid buying a copy. The tables above are the part that gets updated; this part changes rarely.

We wrote recently about the white wedge Keeler painted into every bird's eye, which remains the fastest way to tell his work from the copies. This is the companion piece: not how to spot one, but what there is to find.

It exists because the question comes up constantly and nobody can answer it. A collector finds a bird with 714 scratched into the base and wants to know what else is out there, how many models there were, whether the piece is one of twelve or one of two hundred. The honest answer is that no complete list exists, and the reason is worth understanding before you trust any list that claims to be one.

Why there is no catalog

Keeler ran his business for roughly thirteen years, starting in a garage at the family home in Glendale in 1939. That house was later torn down and a factory built on the same site. In December of 1952, he had a heart attack. He was thirty-nine. His wife Catherine and plant manager Frank Hunt tried to keep production going in the purpose-built factory in San Juan Capistrano that had been nearing completion at the time of his death. Pieces marked Catherine Keeler date from those months. Sadly, the company foundered within a year and the building was sold. Twin Winton moved in about a decade later.

The company's mold book and shape ledger did not survive as a public record, and no trade catalog is held in a museum collection — though a private copy of the factory's own photo trade catalog survives in the family (see the Sources note below), and it is now the single best primary source available for cross-checking mold numbers. Some business paperwork did survive within the family, including insurance documents and tax returns, but no comprehensive parts list among it. Beyond that, what we know about the range comes from the surviving family, a handful of period references, and the objects themselves as they pass through auctions and shops. That is archaeology, not bookkeeping, and it means any list including this one is provisional.

Reading the numbers

The single most useful thing to understand is that Keeler's numbering is not a single run from one upward. It is at least three overlapping systems, and knowing which band a number falls into tells you roughly when the piece was made and where.

1939 — Brad Keeler's early (American Pottery) bird figurines were marked in two ways: with an incised (in-mold) “Brad Keeler” plus a model number, and with an American Pottery paper label.

1946 — After 1946, when the Keeler plant was occupied, a new paper label was used in conjunction with the original recessed mark. Stamped marks were also used on small items.

The three number bands, mapped against where Keeler was working at the time. Overlap is real: molds stayed in production across moves. Note: per family record, the San Juan Capistrano factory was built in 1952 but never became operational during Keeler's lifetime, so the number bands above should be read as a numbering range, not a confirmed production location.

A few practical consequences. A two-digit number on a bird is an early piece. A 700 number falls in the Heron/Rooster range. Letters appended to a number — the pheasant hen marked 38B — usually distinguish the female of a pair from the male. And the occasional four-digit number like the 4617 finch fits no system anyone has explained.

Where the mark actually sits

A note on finding the number, because a great many pieces get sold as unmarked by people who did not turn them all the way over.

The marks you may encounter, roughly in chronological order: Bradster on the earliest work, from the brief partnership with a modeler named James Webster; an American Pottery label on pieces that went out through Evan K. Shaw; stamped BBK (Bradley Burr Keeler) and/or the script Brad Keeler through the main years; an oval black-and-gold Brad Keeler Artware foil label, usually lost; China Dry Goods, Ming Dragon Blood and Wee Chinese during the late WWII years; Pryde & Joy and Catherine Keeler on the last of it.

Telling a Keeler from a knock-off

A mold number is no use to you if the piece in front of you was made by somebody else.

The phrase to watch for is “Brad Keeler style.” It turns up constantly in eBay and Etsy titles, and it is doing a great deal of work in two words. It is not a claim of authorship. It is a claim of resemblance, and it is legal precisely because it promises nothing. A buyer skimming listings sees the name, sees a pink flamingo on a green base, and does not register the word sitting between them. Search results will also surface “style” listings alongside genuine ones for the same query, so the two sit side by side looking equivalent.

Related traps, in rough order of how often they catch people: “attributed to,” “in the manner of,” “Keeler era,” “California pottery, Keeler type,” and a title that names Keeler while the item description never repeats the claim. If the seller cannot show you the base, assume there is a reason.

The short version, if you are standing in a shop with your phone in one hand: turn it over first. Check the mark, then the crazing, then the modelling — are the eyes, talons, wings and feather lines crisp, or has the detail gone soft and muddy? A genuine Keeler base carries no floral embellishment. Only then look at the eye. The white wedge is real, but it is the easiest thing on the bird to imitate, and imitators do.

What is missing

Three gaps are worth naming, because they are where the next real discoveries sit.

The Disney figures are the thinnest section here and the most frustrating. Keeler took on the Disney line in 1946 — Bambi, Donald Duck, José Carioca and the rest — produced under a licensing arrangement while Evan K. Shaw's American Pottery was still active. The figures overlap confusingly with American Pottery's own output, and almost none of the mold numbers have been recorded. A marked Keeler Disney piece with a legible number would be a genuinely useful find.

The Exotic Series has the same problem for a different reason. Fred Kaye designed it as a freelancer, and freelance work at Keeler was frequently marked with stamps rather than incised numbers, which wear off. We know the series existed and roughly what it contained. We do not have the models enumerated.

And the moonshine men — the character figures Keeler's granddaughter remembers from family stories — are barely documented at all. She owns examples herself; they are unmarked. She believes they are among his earliest work, from the Bradster period before the birds took over.

The eye on the No. 47 flamingo: amber iris, dark pupil, white wedge set into it, and a beak that goes cleanly from pink to black without muddying at the join. Worth studying, but worth trusting third — copyists mimic the wedge, and it is the easiest of the three checks to fake.

Corrections wanted

If you own a Keeler piece with a legible number that contradicts this list, or fills one of its gaps, we would like to hear about it — particularly anything in the Disney or Exotic ranges, or anything that would explain the 4617. The most active gathering of knowledge on Keeler is the collectors' group run by his granddaughter Cati Porter, who has been assembling the family history for years and is the reason much of what we do know is written down anywhere.

Reported but not yet catalogued

A round of collection and reference-book photos turned up pieces that don't fit anywhere above. None of these are added as formal entries — no mold-number cross-check was possible — but they're worth recording so the gaps are visible.

Cati Porter owns the complete lobsterware series, which she notes is perhaps the single most documented of Keeler's work. This includes a lobster-claw serving dish and matching lobster salt-and-pepper shakers, documented in Chipman's California Pottery Scrapbook. A crab-claw shell buffet server, part of the Lobster buffet line (mold No. 284), a Catalina-souvenir flying-fish ashtray (No. 402), a trout-motif round plate (No. 141), and a tall red “Ming Dragon Blood” glaze vase (No. 636) all appear in the same reference books with legible marks but no counterpart in the current catalog.

Separately, two vintage advertisements name a “Sunflower Tuna Server” premium and a snowman casserole; both correspond to cross-reference cards in the U.S. Copyright Office entries (GP3814 and GP3228) that point to “See Barnes-Chase Company” — meaning they were licensed through Barnes-Chase rather than registered directly, so their full registration details sit outside the Brad Keeler Artwares filings reviewed here.

This page will be updated as better information turns up. A catalog assembled from objects is never finished; it just gets less wrong.