How old are most antique rocking horses?

The dated listings run from 1860 to 1950. The clustering is interwar rather than Victorian, with the 1920s and 1930s together outnumbering everything else. A good number carry only a reign or century label instead of a year: "19th Century", "Victorian", "Edwardian". Titles and dated fields sometimes disagree, a horse titled 19th century filed under 1930. Nothing in the archive is securely earlier than 1860.

What does a trestle stand mean?

It's the fixed A-frame base with a bar at each end. The horse hangs from it on sprung iron brackets and swings, rather than tipping the way a horse on solid curved rockers does. The safety stand largely replaced the bow rocker from the mid-19th century, and it's the base type that dominates the listings. Other bases recorded include oak bases, pine trestle bases and a single pillar stand on turned uprights.

Which makers turn up on these horses?

Lines, in its various forms, appears most often, followed by Collinson of Liverpool and F. H. Ayres. Names arrive stamped, on a paper label, or simply as "attributed to" in the description. Around a quarter of listings carry a maker at all. The rest are unattributed, and the evidence here won't tell you which firm made one of those. The Lines horses sometimes keep a model designation, SP1 or SP2 Sportiboy.

Why are some described as folk art or naive?

They're trade terms for simply carved horses with flat painted decoration, rather than the modelled body and painted dapples of a commercial toy-firm horse. "Folk art", "naive" and "primitive" appear in a small but distinct set of titles, including a Spanish painted example, and they sit in the lower part of the range. The earliest dated entry in the archive is a primitive horse of 1860.

Does original paint matter in these listings?

Dealers state it deliberately. Original paint, original unrestored condition, playworn and distressed all appear in titles, and so does restored. Both states turn up across the range, so they read as two different propositions rather than one being the default. Pony skin, used instead of paint on a couple of Victorian horses, shows up only twice in the whole archive.

How many come up for sale each year?

About twelve reach this market annually. Sixty-one different dealers have listed one on Sellingantiques. That spread means most dealers who handle them handle a single horse rather than a stable of them.