The heritage collection · RA.1934.1
The Weather Child
A child in a yellow coat who opens a small umbrella about an hour before it rains.
The Weather Child was made for the window of a Seattle department store in the autumn of 1933, at a time when the house took any work that paid, and was bought back by Ada Rosen in 1952 when the store closed. It is a figure of a child about two feet high, in a yellow oilcloth coat, standing on a cobbled base and holding a furled umbrella.
Inside the base is a hair hygrometer, a loop of human hair that lengthens as the air grows damp, and when the humidity passes a point Harald Moen set by trial over one wet winter, a release lets the child raise the umbrella and open it. In Seattle this is not difficult to arrange. In the window it was right, by the store’s count, about four times in five.
The umbrella was recovered in silk in 1988 and again in 2019. The coat is the original.
Object record
- Object type
- Figure with a weather movement
- Made
- The House, Seattle, 1933–1934
- Makers
- Harald Moen, hygrometer; Cora Bellweather, hair; Joseph Lindqvist, figure
- Materials and techniques
- Carved lime, oilcloth, silk, human hair, brass
- Dimensions
- 61 cm high
- Accession number
- RA.1934.1
- Certificate of provenance
- No. 612
- Location
- The Zürich Salon, the house’s own premises, through 2026; it returns to the House in the spring of 2027
- Record
- Cataloged 1953; revised 2026
Records in the heritage catalog are compiled from the Register of Provenance and the makers’ own notebooks. Where the two disagree, the Register is preferred and the disagreement noted. Return to the collection