Varieties of Fancy Mice - Marked - Dutch

This is the National Mouse Club Standard for the Dutch. " Eye colour to be as in standardised variety. In Dutch marked the face or cheek markings should be evenly balanced, a patch covering each side of the face, extending below the eye but not including the whiskers, and not joining between the ears at the narrowest part of the blaze. The cheek markings should not run underneath the jaw. The saddle should come well up from the tail to the middle of the body and be clean cut, top and under. Tail stop to be approximately halfway along the tail. The stops on the hind feet should come halfway between the tips of the toes and the hock. Colour of markings should be carried out in the ears. The coloured markings may be any standard colour."

In fact it is almost impossible to produce a Dutch which comes up to this Standard. The few excellent Dutch which are bred go on and win, but they may not produce off-spring as good as themselves.

The Agouti Dutch below has a saddle that is certainly not straight and it does not have the correct markings (stops) on the back feet (although these don't show in the photograph). It has a rather bad "drag" on the left (visible) cheek marking. There seems to be a hint of the agouti colouring slipping into the whisker bed. This is another fault.

Below are two photographs of Black Dutch. The head markings can be seen clearly. They are not perfect but are better than the Agouti Dutch. The blaze (space on the head between the markings) is a but uneven, but the cheeks don't (quite) creep into the whisker beds. Neither photograph shows the best view of the saddle, but it is obviously slipping. It should come up to the the mouse's middle (although, in practice, they never do).

 

 

After the photographs of modern Dutch……

 

The Dutch is an old variety of Fancy Mouse. They were being shown in the 1890's. We show here some drawings of Dutch mice owned by Walter Maxey (founder of the National Mouse Club) in the late 1890's. Of one thing we can be sure, the saddles were never as good as the picture. The picture is a woodcut (or whatever was used in printing) and would be an "artists impression" based on a description

Another reason for doubting the accuracy of the drawings is this photograph of a Dutch mouse owned by Miss G Openshaw was being shown at the same time as Walter Maxey's Dutch mice. Miss Openshaw's mouse is very similar in markings to the present-day Dutch pictured above. This suggests that Walter Maxey's Dutch mice didn't look their picture, and Dutch mice haven't improved much in 100 years! (unless Miss Openshaw's mouse was an exception)

This is an advertisement from the 1890's.

 

Colour photographs by Eric Jukes
The other pictures and advertisement are from two books on mice with were published in the 1890's. (We will print the precise references shortly)

 

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LSCMRC Web Site - Updated 10th May 1999
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