Enid Yandell

Enid was interested in representing human passions through figures with mythological and/or literary associations. Inspired by a German Rhineland legend, Enid's Kiss Tankard depicts the tale of a fisherboy and mermaid. Goethe popularized this legend in his poem, "Der Fischer," (1778) which ends:

The water rushed, the water rose

And we his naked feet;

His heart with yearnings swells and grows

As when two lovers meet,

She spoke to him, she sang to him,

And then his fate was plain:

Half drawn by her he glided in

And was not seen again.

Neither the artistic nor emotional success of the tankard, however, depends upon one's familiarity with this literary symbolism. When the tankard's lid isopened, the fisherboy and the mermaid come forward in an embrace as the fisherboy leans toward the water and kisses the mermaid on the lips.

The kiss theme was a traditional one which became immensely popular during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Auguste Rodin's successful Kiss is undoubtedly the most famous. Miss Yandell was exposed to two similar subjects at the Nashville Centennial which were probably equally influential on her. The Lapini Brothers from Milan prominently displayed a work called the First Kiss. Of greater significance, however, is a life-size sculpture of the Shepherd Boy and the Mermaid, located at the edge of a grotto in Lily Lake, at the Nashville Centennial. Although it depicts a shepherd boy and not a fisher boy as in Enid's version, the relationship between this male figure and the mermaid is nearly identical to that between the figures on the Kiss Tankard.

One critic described Enid's tankard as her "most artistic work." As innovative as it was, its American success was undoubtedly related to other fashions of the last decade of the nineteenth century: the popularity of loving cups as presentation pieces to friends, which became even more fashionable with the Gorham Company's marketing of Art Nouveau style Martele tankards, and the then current vogue for elaborately designed yachting trophies that incorporated human figures, particularly mermaids. These market conditions may very well have encouraged Tiffany's to sell silver castings of Miss Yandell's tankard in time for the 1899 Christmas season. However, Tiffany's silversmith was ot quite as accurate as the Rudier Foundry, the Paris firm that cast the tankard in bronze previously. In the Tiffany castings, the fisherboy overshoots the mermaid's lips, causing his nose to hit the mermaid's collarbone, while she is left staring at his Adam's apple. A clever Brooklyn journalist titled his article on the subject "When a Kiss is Not a Kiss." Still, the tankard was a success and the demand for it great. Enid thought so highly of this piece that she chose it from among her many works as a wedding gift for her sister Elsie. Despite the tremendous success of the Kiss Tankard*, Miss Yandell apparently did not use the tankard form again in her work.