coastal.tours
Crazy-Cut
Man overboard, after 1935. 99 plywood pieces, 27 x 17 cm. Interlocking grid cut. Tuck's Crazy-Cut interlocking puzzle, made in England by Raphael Tuck & Sons Ltd.
I bought this puzzle together with the Glion puzzle shown earlier. The seller had mixed the two puzzles up, so that this one was in an unmarked box, and the Glion in a Tuck's Crazy-Cut box. Luckily they were sold together!
The Tuck box of course had a label, which gave as the title 'Man overboard'. While this is not inconsistent with the image, showing a tall ship out at sea, it is actually quite hard to see a man overboard (there is some activity on the right, but not clear what is going on). Fortunately, we can find this painting on the internet, confirming as its title 'A man overboard' (1893), painted by Thomas Jacques Somerscales (1842-1927). This is catalogue number WAG 2653 in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
So now we know this is indeed a Tuck's Crazy-Cut puzzle, as one might have guessed looking at the cut.
Crazy-Cut puzzles differ from Tuck's more common and more sublime Zag-Zaw puzzles in being interlocking and having no figurals. The cut lines swirl and the knobs are crooked, producing a rather wild overall effect. However, if we look at the way the blank is divided, we find the typical Tuck procedure of recursively cutting the blank in two until we reach an even number of rectangular slabs with a limited piece count (12 in this case). Whereas the Zag-Zaw puzzles typically have a figural at the center of each slab, here we find just a regular (though swirling) grid cut within each rectangle. The total of 99 pieces is achieved by splitting up three larger pieces.
This puzzle does not appear in a 1935 Tuck catalogue, hence the dating.
Crazy-Cut
Man overboard, after 1935. 99 plywood pieces, 27 x 17 cm. Interlocking grid cut. Tuck's Crazy-Cut interlocking puzzle, made in England by Raphael Tuck & Sons Ltd.
I bought this puzzle together with the Glion puzzle shown earlier. The seller had mixed the two puzzles up, so that this one was in an unmarked box, and the Glion in a Tuck's Crazy-Cut box. Luckily they were sold together!
The Tuck box of course had a label, which gave as the title 'Man overboard'. While this is not inconsistent with the image, showing a tall ship out at sea, it is actually quite hard to see a man overboard (there is some activity on the right, but not clear what is going on). Fortunately, we can find this painting on the internet, confirming as its title 'A man overboard' (1893), painted by Thomas Jacques Somerscales (1842-1927). This is catalogue number WAG 2653 in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool.
So now we know this is indeed a Tuck's Crazy-Cut puzzle, as one might have guessed looking at the cut.
Crazy-Cut puzzles differ from Tuck's more common and more sublime Zag-Zaw puzzles in being interlocking and having no figurals. The cut lines swirl and the knobs are crooked, producing a rather wild overall effect. However, if we look at the way the blank is divided, we find the typical Tuck procedure of recursively cutting the blank in two until we reach an even number of rectangular slabs with a limited piece count (12 in this case). Whereas the Zag-Zaw puzzles typically have a figural at the center of each slab, here we find just a regular (though swirling) grid cut within each rectangle. The total of 99 pieces is achieved by splitting up three larger pieces.
This puzzle does not appear in a 1935 Tuck catalogue, hence the dating.