The sun., 1902-03-09
AN ENGLISH GIRLS QUAINT ART
Miss vuiIianiy Winning Fame by Making
Grotcsuuc Figures I'm Pottery.

American girls have no monopoly Of
business success. Their English cousins
are their rivals, and English girls are win
ming fame and money in many fields of
work.
Cne clever English girl artist has blazed
a path for herself in the last three years.
has evolved a scheme in which art and
business trot amiably in double harness.
She is a maker Of pottery, but Of pottery
unlike anything else in the market. Her
studio and the artistic little shop which
she has opened are veritable goblin mar
kets. crowded with bogies. weird, fas-
cinating. indescribable bogies.
The grotesque is the young artists
speciality. She tries nothing else and she
cannot tell you how her ridiculous little
demons and strange hybrid creatures
creep into her mind. She "just sees things
so"
They have always come TO her. She
can. remember time when she didn't
see them at every turn. II you have an
eye for the grotesque II meets you at every
turn. so she says. Even when she was
little tot she saw the spooks and tried 10
make them in wax.
The thought of a childhood given over
to such Imagination will waken TO pity
any one who has seen the jugs and jars
and trays and panels. but she says she was
jolly little youngster in large family.
we all went in for exagGerations. she
says laughingly. .One sister is a high
church nun. One il low church Chinese
missionary. One Is a gymnasium teacher.
and /" she waved her hand at her bogics
When Miss Vuilamy was stud ying art
at Alexandra House she spent spare hours
in modelling her weird fancies in gesso.
The Queen and other visitors noti ced the
frealtish creations. bought them asked for
more. and encouraged bv this the girl
decided to devote her whole time to the
original work that she loved.
Some ancestor of hers must have carved
gargoyles and other medieval monstrosi-
ties and handed his skill as a creator of
mvt hical animals down to this slim girl
descendant, for there's touch Of the
medieval about her work. Ii hints az
Notre Dame monsters and carved choir
stalls in old English cathedrals. and grin
ming gargoyles ON Italian palaces.
The artist works in a mixture Of clay
and wax, using the most astonishing things
for foundations, shells, bones, rocks, old
pieces OF china, anything and everything
whose shape is welrdly suggested To her
Il get some Of my best ideas from bones"
she SAYS You cant think what curious
likenesses TO living things one sees in bones.
The head Of the dissecting department
at the Zoo is a friend of the artists and
there she obtains many of her most cur
ious models and ideas. The sea furnishes
her with all sorts of treasure trove and
almost all Of her goblins' heads are moulded
on shells.
The mouth OF shell invariably sug-
gests the mouth of some queer monster
and the mouth, SO Miss Nuillamy insists,
IL the key note OF a grotesque creature.
She keeps a big cabinet full of these EN-
bryonic gobiins, all of them 10 be worked
into pottery some day. and from any one
of the misshapen bits of material she can
sketch out nightmare creature.
Around her rooms go endless professions
and birds, some of them frightfll, some
deliciously funny, all cleverly imagined
and modelled.
But the names the artist has given TO
her creatures would win favor for them.
even were they less interesting in them
selves Evidently their maker has trav-
elled with Alice In Wonderland and brought
back notes of beasts Alice forgot TO men
tion.
There are the Poggs. They are queer
beasts, part toad, part bat all jug or jar.
They couldn't by any chance, be any
thing but PoSgs. One feels the fitness
of the name. the moment ones eyes rest
upon tnsm.
Inc lOBgh are not al dllke. lhey have
family resemblance, but they vary greatly
and a Smiley Pogg is a JOY TO any beholder
such an idiotic, jovial absurd, delightful
bogie.
A Growl Howl is a goblin dog with hack
like bat and looks quite as fierce as his
name, but best of all the jugs is the Grivel-
ling CHM. IL looks the name, and IL looks
like nothing else.
One might pass by Pogg, ignore even
a Smiley Pogg, turn way from Growl
nn vi "a hgarf in kta
breast and love of nonsense in that heart
could resist a Grivelling CHM.
Miss Nuilamy has struck n happy note,
and the public that revellcd in Wonderland
and the land behind the Looking Glass is
fairly sure to grant her high favor.