For most of the last century, Ethelwynne M. Quail has been known – if she has been known at all – as a footnote. Her name appears in small print beneath 29 luminous colour plates in a 1952 book about the unseen spirits in nature, credited simply as 'illustrated by'. The book, The Kingdom of the Gods, made her images famous within Theosophical circles around the world. The artist behind them remained almost entirely invisible.
This autumn, that changes. From 10th October 2026 to 31st January 2027, The College of Psychic Studies presents Ethelwynne M. Quail: The Kingdom of the Gods, the first public solo exhibition of her original paintings and drawings – work that has never before been shown to the public.
Who was Ethelwynne Quail?
Ethelwynne M. Quail (1903–1947) was a South African artist and sculptor associated with the Theosophical movement. She was entirely self-taught and worked across sculpture, drawing, painting and writing throughout her short life. Long before her name became linked to devas and nature spirits, she had already built a career as a sculptor: her work was exhibited in Britain during the 1920s, including at the Royal Academy and the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool.
It is her paintings, however, that form the heart of this exhibition.
A collaboration with the unseen
In March 1937, the Theosophical writer and clairvoyant Geoffrey Hodson arrived in South Africa. Hodson had spent much of the 1920s recording detailed accounts of his encounters with devas and nature spirits – non-human intelligences that, in Theosophical thought, were understood to shape and animate the natural world. He had described these beings vividly in writing, but he had never found an artist able to give them visual form.
Quail, who was already familiar with Hodson's books and deeply drawn to his descriptions of these beings, offered to try. What followed was an unusual and intensive creative partnership: as Hodson described the beings he was observing – mountain gods, sea sylphs, angels of beauty, mountain sylphs – Quail translated his descriptions directly into paint.
This collaboration produced the 29 finished paintings reproduced in The Kingdom of the Gods, executed in the mountains of South Africa. Quail did not live to see them widely known: she died in 1947, five years before Hodson's book was finally published.
From private paintings to public reproductions
When The Kingdom of the Gods appeared in 1952, Quail's images reached readers across the Theosophical world as printed colour plates. For decades, this was the only way anyone encountered her work – as illustration, in service of Hodson's text, several steps removed from the original paintings themselves.
The originals, meanwhile, remained with her family, rarely seen and never publicly exhibited. This autumn's exhibition, developed with the generous support and collaboration of the family and Estate of Ethelwynne M. Quail, brings more than 20 of these paintings and drawings together for the first time, alongside archival material, photographs and personal correspondence that help trace the life of the artist behind the plates.
Seen at scale, and in person, the work asks to be understood differently – not as illustrative support for someone else's book, but as a body of work in its own right: luminous in ways reproduction has never quite captured.
A place in a wider lineage
The exhibition repositions Quail within a lineage of women artists who used Theosophical and esoteric ideas to develop new visual languages for realities beyond ordinary perception. This lineage includes better-known names such as Hilma af Klint and Ithell Colquhoun. Where af Klint painted her sense of spiritual abstraction and Colquhoun explored surrealism and magic, Quail worked in close, direct collaboration with a clairvoyant's testimony, translating someone else's inner vision into a shared visual record.
It is a rare kind of authorship – part portraiture of the invisible, part transcription, part independent artistic vision – and one that this exhibition finally allows the public to assess on its own terms.
Ethelwynne M. Quail: The Kingdom of the Gods | The Etheric Field 10th October 2026 – 31st January 2027 The College of Psychic Studies, 16 Queensberry Place, London SW7 2EB. Tuesday–Sunday, 11am–4pm. Free entry, donations welcome.
Ethelwynne M. Quail: The Kingdom of the Gods runs alongside a second exhibition, The Etheric Field, featuring contemporary artists Gabriella Boyd, Aleksandra Ionowa, Mila Nowacka and Vanessa da Silva, whose work continues to explore the relationship between inner experience and the world around us.
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