Together with Bates, Pomeroy and Frampton, Charles John Allen (1862-1955) stands as one of the significant artists of the 'New Sculpture'. His group Love and the Mermaid was first exhibited in Liverpool, shown at the Royal Academy in 1895, and in 1900 was awarded a gold medal at the Paris International Exhibition. The large bronze version is now in the Walker Art Gallery.
Allen himself had earlier treated a similar watery subject in his The Murmur of the Sea relief for the Philharmonic Hall Hotel (Curtis, op. cit.), which like the present group rippled with a graceful motion. He must also have been looking at works by Gilbert, such as the fishy details and Eros on the Monument to Lord Shaftesbury. It is interesting to note that Gilbert executed a work of the same subject in circa 1907, The Call of the Sea, now known only through a photograph (Dorment, op. cit.). The fascination with sprites and mermaids was popular at that time both in literature and art. Various sculptors worked on the theme: there is the identical subject by Boehm Cupid and the Mermaid of 1889-91 (Stocker, op. cit.), Pegram's The Bather of 1895 and Lanteri's The Fisherman and the Mermaid (Spielmann, op. cit.). Of these Allen's is the most compact and sinuous, the spiralling motion from the mermaid's tail drawing Cupid into a mesmerising vortex. The easy sweep of the composition is enlivened by the detailed texturing of the fish tail, feathery wings and sea spume, crisply rendered in this fine lost-wax cast.