1958 Spirit of Ecstasy

by Lin Grosvenor

Title

1958 Spirit of Ecstasy

Artist

Lin Grosvenor

Medium

Photograph

Description

"A graceful little goddess, the Spirit of Ecstasy, who has selected road travel as her supreme delight and alighted on the prow of a Rolls-Royce motor car to revel in the freshness of the air and the musical sound of her fluttering draperies, she is expressing her keen enjoyment, with her arms outstretched and her sight fixed upon the distance."

By 1910 personal mascots had become the fashion of the day. Rolls-Royce were concerned to note that some owners were affixing "inappropriate" ornaments to their cars. Claude Johnson, then managing director of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars, was asked to commission a more dignified and graceful mascot.

The Spirit of Ecstasy, also called "Emily", "Silver Lady" or "Flying Lady", was designed by English sculptor Charles Robinson Sykes. He had designed an earlier, similar satuette ("Whisper"), for Baron Montagu of Beaulieu, a pioneer of the automobile movement, and editor of The Car Illustrated magazine. He and the model for his personal mascot, Eleanor Velasco (Thorn) Thornton, his secretary, were in the midst of a decade-long clandestine affair (different social classes, an inconvenient current wife and all that). Sykes again chose her as his muse, and in three different sizes and many materials, she has endured ever since.

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April 7th, 2016

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