Page 173 - Bulletin 8 2004

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O, what a delightful thing is Miss E. Quail’s bronze, exhibited at the Autumn
Salon at Liverpool!

The work, which admirably expresses its title: “The Spirits of the Wind”,
forms a group as animated and as ethereal as the spirit can conceive, or the
imagination dream.

It is the wind itself one would say, which has arranged the attitude of the
group; these bodies at once graceful and muscular seem to draw each other in
a vertical swoop, borne on the buoyant wing of a whirlwind –

And what bodies! what faces! what hands! what nobility of flesh! is it truly
there in bronze?

How has art been able to produce in metal such profound delicacy, such
spirituality, given to it the ardour and vivacity, the roguishness and the joy,
without which it has only the value of durability and the plenitude of its metal.

It is truly there in beautiful sculpture such as makes one believe in the artistic
worth of our generation.

A number of copies were made, one of which was bought by the BBC and another by the
Oppenheimer family.

Her second exhibited bronze depicted a young boy lying on his stomach playing with a
train. Her subject was a local St. James boy, Willoughby Cleghorn. (Figs. 4.6 & 4.7). The

Wave of the Rock, a piece in plaster, was inspired by an old legend about a sea nymph (the
Essence of the Foam) who releases her lover from a rock by using her foamy kisses to

carve it into the form of her desire. (Fig. 4.8). The Crest of the Wave, like the Wave of the
Rock, was inspired by the seas that lapped and crashed against the St. James coastline. A

number of drawings show the kinetic energy within waves perceived as inner life forces.

The completed bronze shows a figure poised momentarily on the wave crest before
plummeting down with the collapsing mass of water. (Figs. 4.9 & 4.10).