Four reliefs: A Mermaid; The Fortune Teller; and The Ball of Wool (two linked designs)

These four designs and lots 280 and 281 are examples of the coloured reliefs that Anning Bell developed in the late 1880s in collaboration with the sculptor George Frampton. Bell's reliefs were frequently featured in the Studio magazine in the 1890s, and a group was included in his one man exhibition at the Fine Art Society in April - May 1907, including a cast of The Fortune Teller (no. 38).
A Mermaid is a version of one of a series of panels made for 'Les Bois des Moustiers', Verengeville, Normandy, a house designed by Edwin Lutyens for Guillaume Mallet (C. Gere & M. Whiteway, Nineteenth-Century Design: From Pugin to Mackintosh, London, 1993, p. 233, pl. 295, illustrated (model)). A banker and anglophile, Mallet commissioned the panels by way of giving names to the rooms of the house, having them fixed beside each door. Still in situ, they are dated 1899, and all show female figures gracefully disposed within frames. The Studio featured the scheme (XIX, 1900, pp. 264-7), reproducing the original of the Mermaid, which differs from the present version in having a purple background.
The two linked designs of The Ball of Wool, are a fine early example of Bell's plaster reliefs. In 1903 he exhibited The Red Skein at the Royal Watercolour Society, which may have been a watercolour version of the design.