men be consulted. Carlisle was reluctant to allow an inscription which made distinctions by sex, such as "Board of Lady Managers", to appear on the coin, but he eventually agreed to that wording. On April 24, the Mint Director sent Palmer a box containing two plaster models of the obverse, one of Isabella as a young queen, the other showing her more mature. He also informed her that distaff reverse would be used, with the wording agreed to by Carlisle. The obverse models were supposedly made by Barber based on an engraving of Isabella forwarded by Peddle to the Mint at Palmer's request, but Moran suggests that the period of only a day between receipt of the engraving and completion of the models (during which Barber also attended the funeral of Bosbyshell's grandson) means that Barber was working on them before that. The Board of Lady Managers on May 5 selected the young queen. Design and reception The obverse of the Isabella quarter depicts a crowned and richly clothed bust of that Spanish queen. According to art historian Cornelius Vermeule, Barber's obverse design "follow[s] Gilbert Scott's Victorian Gothic tradition of photographic classicism, best summed up by the groups of continents and the reliefs of famous persons on the Albert Memorial in London." The reverse depicts a kneeling woman with distaff and spindle. Vermeule traces that imagery to the figure of a young female servant, carved upon the east pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia in the 5th century B.C. Nevertheless, a contemporary account in the American Journal of Numismatics compared the reverse to an anti-slavery token with a kneeling woman and the legend "Am I not a woman and a sister". The art historian, writing in 1971, noted that "nowadays the coin seems charming for its quaintness and its Victorian flavor, a mixture of cold Hellenism and Renaissance romance. Perhaps one of its greatest joys is that none of the customary inscriptions, mottoes and such, appear on it." Numismatic historian Don Taxay, in his study of early U.S. commemoratives, dismissed contemporary accounts (such as in the fair's official book) that Kenyon Cox had provided a design for the quarter; he noted that the artist's son had strongly denied that his father was involved in the coin's creation. Taxay deemed the design "commonplace" and "typical of Barber's style", stating that "the modeling, though somewhat more highly relieved than on