It sounds like a wonderfully macabre experiment: What would happen if you created a scarce SR on a model nobody collects? And even better - what if they throw in some even rarer pieces in the mix, like they did with the previous Gambler’s Choice?
(Actually, that last part’s not a "what if": they’ve said as much on the official BreyerFest blog.)
It’s not so far fetched when you give it some thought. It’s a vintage mold, we haven’t seen her for a while (since 2006, as the light gray #1234 Sahara), and she’s got an artsy, fantastical look that would fit in well with the fairytale theme. Toss in a crazy, metallic paint job, and I think we've got a winner.
(You're talking to someone who's got two test color Roxanas: our interpretations of "winning" are probably going to be a little different.)
Lady Roxana is more popular than you might think among nonhobbyists and the younger set, most of whom just see a cute little prancing horse with a swoopy mane and tail, and not a personal affront to their delicate artistic sensibilities.
Roxana was meant to be much prettier than she turned out to be, as Rich Rudish’s original sketch hints at:
As for what went wrong, exactly, between conception and execution, I’m not going to go into that, especially since it seems to be a topic that gets some hobbyists way more agitated than they need to be.
(I actually saw a hobbyist get red in the face at BreyerFest one year, whilst discussing Lady Roxana mold. Her argument ended with "I know what art is, and this isn’t it!" Being trained as an art historian, the infamous quote attributed the artist James McNeill Whistler came immediately to mind. Since comparing hobbyists to cows has been shown to be not so good an idea, I wisely refrained.)
I have no personal beef against her (the mold, or that hobbyist.) She’s not what I was hoping for either, but she has some finer qualities worth appreciating, too. Lady Roxana was the first freestanding Traditional mold to do a correct trot: it wouldn’t be until over a decade later that they’d attempt the two-points-plus-tail-balancing act again, with the Rejoice mold.
I also think she has a very pleasing, Art Nouveau feel to her which, considering she was originally sculpted as part of the "Artist Series" of molds, might have been intentional. Mr. Rudish is no longer with us, however, so we’ll never know for sure.
