Description

Vegetable marionette with a tomato, carrot, turnip, onion and beet. The bodies are made of hardened plaster of Paris and each vegetable has a painted face and legs of cloth with hard feet. The vegetables hang from a single crossbar made of plastic. There is a tag that reads "Vegetables from Peter Rabbit."This marionette is part of a collection of over fifty marionettes, all handmade by Helen Rayley Farnum, a Minneapolis-based puppeteer, and her family. Ms. Farnum raised four children in Minneapolis in the 1920s before launching a career as a puppeteer that spanned from the 1930s to the 1950s. Her children's shows, which usually retold familiar fairy tales, were presented at schools, theaters and even, in 1941, at the bedsides of sick children in local hospitals. The puppet shows also appeared for many years on "Little People's Theatre", a show on KSTP-TV, a local Twin Cities channel. Ms. Farnum died in 1982. Her daughter, Julianne Anderson, donated her puppets to HHM in 1995.