Question:
We have recently been cleaning our father’s house and found a cookie jar with Red Wing USA on the bottom and in searching this site found that it looks exactly like the Chef Pierre Cookie Jar that you have pictured in another inquiry – but we noticed that color of our cookie jar was not mentioned so we wondered if it is not really Red Wing – the one we found is pink with brown speckles and the shoes, scarf, eye, hair and poofy part of the chef hat are navy blue – is this really a Red Wing cookie jar – thanks

Answer:
Your pink Chef Pierre is an authentic Red Wing cookie jar.

The "Chef" cookie jar was introduced by Red Wing in 1941, along with his friends Katrina the Dutch girl and Friar Tuck. Price lists from 1942, 1943 and 1944 show them as being available in blue, yellow, and tan colors. An undated brochure, probably from the mid to late 1940s adds green as an available color. The early brochures refer to the jar as "Pierre the Chef".

These three cookie jars were great sellers for Red Wing. Many thousands of them were made and production continued into the mid 1950s. By then Katrina and Friar Tuck had been dropped from production, but the Chef continued on along with several newly introduced cookie jar shapes. An brochure from 1956 lists fleck pink and fleck blue as the only two available colors. The "fleck" refers to the brown speckles that you mention in your description. The pink jars I’ve seen have the dark blue trim as you’ve described. 1956 was probably the last year of production for the Chef as he does not appear in a 1957 dealers price list.

Yellow seems to have been the best seller for colors, followed by blue, tan and green. The later fleck pink and fleck blue are very uncommon because they were made for a much shorter period, at the very end of production. You have a valuable piece, especially if your pink Chef is in excellent condition. One sold on eBay earlier this year for around $1000 as I recall.

Larry