As Pre-Raphaelitism broke into British Art at the exhibitions of 1849 and 1850, it became one of the most talked-about movements, exciting both enthusiasm and hostility. The poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti described the original impulse behind the Pre-Raphaelites as “visionary vanities of half a dozen boys.” Alongside, John Ruskin also promoted this movement to such an extent that it became a nationwide influence to all the artists for over the next half-century. For those of you who are probably new to the history of Pre-Raphaelitism, I would like to share one of the most famous works of the movement, which would give you an idea of the art style; Medea By Frederick Sandys. Through this eminent artwork, it is not wrong to say that Pre-Raphaelite art is distinguished throughout its existence by truth to both actuality and imagination. As a contemporary art movement, it is characterized by poetic subjects, a belief in history as a living text, a desire to render the natural world as God’s creation, and a determination to touch on social concerns. Now, as you read the above line, you might notice that it draws its inspiration from Early Renaissance art. It simply means that there is the use of more vivid colors, close observation, iconoclastic composition with intense individual expression, symbolized with moral meaning but in a modern way. Majorly, its adherents include both males and females, but somehow, few woman artists were hidden from histories of the Pre-Raphaelitism. However, this does not mean that the movement was any less welcoming to women, while not mitigating the disadvantages of the access and esteem they faced in the art world. One of the forgotten and neglected artists, who is significant to the movement is Evelyn De Morgan, for whom we are here.
Evelyn De Morgan | Fast Knowledge
Evelyn De Morgan, a Pre-Raphaelite, was a British-origin painter who created dramatic frames narrating social messages by using sacred subjects portrayed with immense decoration and precise drawing skills. Born in 1885, she mastered giving individualism to the figures in her paintings.
Artist Abstract: Evelyn De Morgan.
Born as Mary Evelyn Pickering in 1855, the artist’s father was Percival Pickering QC, lawyer. Studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, under Edward Poynter during the time 1873-5, she completed her studies in Italy. Evelyn was so capable that she subsequently established her own studio in London. Often visited by her uncle, Pre-Raphaelite painter, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, in Tuscany, she married William Frend De Morgan, a potter and later novelist, in 1887.
| Artist | Evelyn De Morgan |
| Birth | 1885 |
| Death | 2 May 1919 |
| Nationality | British |
| Genre | Mythological and Biblical Allegorical Paintings |
| Period | Pre-Raphaelitism |
| Famous Paintings | Flora, Medea |
Life of the Artist.
Born in 1855 in London, she began her lessons for drawing at the age of 15. At first, instantly, while she was learning, Evelyn won the prize at South Kensington and Slade Schools; in 1875, she paid her first visit to Italy. And sooner, along with St Catherine of Alexandria, she had her first exhibition at the Dudley Gallery in 1879, followed by a regular exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery, including sculpture in 1880. It was also in 1887 that she married William De Morgan, a potter and associate of William Morris, who shared a deep interest in spiritualism. The New Gallery was a regular place for De Morgan to exhibit between 1888 and 1901, establishing his reputation as an idiosyncratic, Burne-Jones disciple.
Evelyn De Morgan mainly used subjects, including sacred and allegorical figures, scenes, and legends, with moral or social messages. I feel to know more about her, we have to know her artworks. Nearly all the accounts of Evelyn’s life and work mention her tremendous passion for painting and her joy in creating them. One of her friends, May Morris wrote,
“Her pictures have an epic quality and are spacious in conception, while (in her later work) showing an almost exaggerated insistence on decorative detail. They are remarkable for the beauty of drapery design, for vigorous and delicate drawing, and for sumptuous color, for great enjoyment of textures. She had astonishing physical endurance and Power of work.”
Evelyn shared a great bond with her husband, William, and due to this happy partnership, her work became more pragmatic as selling her pictures was significant to prop up her husband’s uncertain business. Though she never exhibited at the Royal Academy, she had exhibitions in some of the more avante-garde galleries like Grosvenor and New Galleries. Evelyn De Morgan’s biographer, her sister Wilhelmina Stirling, gives an in-depth account of the artist’s struggles to gain an education and work as a painter. The Sunday entry reads,
“Got up late; dawdled overdressing, went to Church; in the afternoon walked. Dawdled, dawled, dawled through a great deal of precious time.”
On the 17th birthday of Evelyn, she wrote,
“Art is eternal, but life is short, and each minute idly spent will rise, swelled to whole months and years, and hound me in my grave.”
Evelyn created a strange and beautiful world in her compositions. Imagine the colorful land inhabited by brawny female figures entwined with convoluted human friezes draped in swirling arabesques. Serpentine whorls, fearful, wistful, and sometimes expressionless faces expressed her recurrent subjects of depression, struggle, darkness, light, regret, yearning, sleeping, and dreaming derived from mythology and literacy. In all of her compositions, there is an enclosed world of airless quality that incorporates drama of sea, mountains, and night sky with a horizontal sunrise. All of her compositions are frequently bisected as if they show a dream world with a physical reality. One of the significant factors of her artwork is the largeness and their ambitious scale. Now, let us look at her artworks in the next section.
Looking at the Artworks by Evelyn De Morgan.
1. By the Waters of Babylon.
| Date | 1883 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 89.5 x 166.7 cm |
| Where is it situated? | De Morgan Foundation, London |
Evelyn’s uncle, Spencer Stanhope, displayed his Waters of Lethe (located in Manchester City Art Galleries) at the Grosvenor the previous year, which inspired Evelyn De Morgan to create this painting. Despite the presence of Kate Gardner Hastings’ By the Water of Babylon at the Grosvenor in 1883, there may have been a general stimulus for this subject. An Italianate landscape personalizes this artwork. The Art Chronicle, 1883 describes the artwork,
“she looks at nature, whether in the human form or in the landscape, more persistently than ever through the medium of the early Florentine School, illuminated by the sidelights of Mr. Burne Jones and Mr. Stanhope.”
Then, the Spectator critic explains wrote,
“the picture is hardly rightly to be described as a failure, for it has, despite certain conventionalities of treatment and a too obvious echo of other artists’ work, much truth of feeling, with considerable beauty of color; the figures are well grouped and painted, the whole work is distinctly pleasant to look upon.”
The kind soulful colors, anguished expression of the girl at the center, and beautiful landscape, Evelyn showed in this mythological and Biblical painting, turn the viewers towards it.
2. Dawn (Aurora Triumphans).
| Date | 1886 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 117 x 172.5 cm |
| Where is it situated? | Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth |
The artwork shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1886 is one of the most beautiful paintings of the artist’s gallery with a symbolic dichotomy of light and darkness. The drowsy figure at the right, accompanied by fanfare from heroic angel trumpeters, signifies enlightenment as the painting depicts the awakening of light. The driving signifies enlightenment, and the figure on the bottom left portrays dispelling the darkness and doubts that engulf the human spirit. According to preliminary drawings, the angels formed the core image of the conception, which has been linked to William Blake despite the possibility of an Italianate source observed during the artist’s sojourn in Florence. In 1891, the artwork was on sale at the Liverpool Autumn Exhibition. And somehow, the owners recognized it wrongly, so Evelyn’s sister, Wilhelmina Stirling attributed it rightly twenty years after its purchase.
3. Medea.
| Date | 1889 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 149.8 x 88.9 cm |
| Where is it situated? | Williamson Art Gallery and Museum, Birkenhead |
The artwork came in the exhibition at the New Gallery in 1890 with a quotation from William Morris’ Life and Death of Jason,
“Day by day/ She saw the happy time fade fast away/ And as she fell from out that happiness/ Again she grew to be the sorceress/ Worker of fearful things, as once she was.”
The lines portray Medea, who turned her magical powers for revenge, more in sorrow than in anger. Dressed in a splendid dress with distinguished colors, Evelyn De Morgan portrayed her royalty and innocence with unhappiness in her expression, suggested by the echoing marble halls through which she wanders. In order to counter her abandonment, she turns to sorcery, holding a vial of poison intended for her rival Glauce. Evelyn rewrites the narrative of the murderous mother who was supposed to receive respect, not a cruel dismissal from a faithless Jason for her magical powers. This painting is the first of several sophisticated canvases with an elaborate setting and narrative context.
4. Portrait of William De Morgan.
| Date | 1893 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 39.4 x 29.2 cm |
| Where is it housed? | De Morgan Foundation, London |
We know that in 1887, Evelyn married the potter and novelist, William De Morgan. She painted this portrait of her husband when he was at the age of fifty-four. Both of their marriage was “companionate marriage” that was creative, had no children, but pursued each of their professions diligently while sharing the same belief towards spiritualism. Evelyn portrays a lightweight look of William Morris, in a direct and openfaced way. The small-scale artwork had plain handling with marked contrast to the flamboyance of Evelyn’s exhibition works of this decade such as Medea and Flora and Earthbound.
5. Flora.
| Date | 1894 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Dimensions | 198.1 x 86.3 cm |
| Where is it housed? | De Morgan Foundation, London |
In 1890, when Evelyn De Morgan acquired an apartment in Florence, she began to spend six months every year there, and that’s when she painted this artwork. The composition is the most celebrated painting of Evelyn’s career, which derives from the studies of Botticelli’s compositions, La Primavera and The Birth of Venus mediated with the study of Ovid’s calendar of the months, the Fasti. The painting has Goddess Flora as the subject matter, transformed from the nymph Chloris to the Mother of Flowers. Evelyn makes sure that she puts the defining qualities of both Spring and Venus with a holy expression. She writes an inscription,
“I come down from Florence and am Flora/ This city takes its name from flower/ Among the flowers I was born and now by a change of home/ I have my dwelling among the mountains of Scotia/ Welcome and let my treasure amid northern mists be dear to you.”
Nearly all the energy in Evelyn’s paintings is filled with individualism, despite the ever-linking hands and arms curiously separating each other. In Medea, the fearsome murderous character of Greek mythology is depicted as a more benign sorceress, standing reed-like within a marble corridor of a Renaissance palace, this trait contributed to her paintings’ success, and Flora, which was painted in Florence as a tribute to Botticelli’s Primavera, was her most famous painting.
Final Words.
Evelyn De Morgan was one of the great painters of Pre-Raphaelitism, who saw the beginnings of modern art and got bewildered by it. On seeing an exhibition of Cubist and Futurist art, she commented,
“if that is what people like now, I shall wait for the turn of the tide.”
Resources.
- Dictionary of Women Artists by Delia Gaze.
- Pre-Raphaelite Women Artists by Jan Marsh.
- Featured Image: The Cadence of Autumn by Evelyn De Morgan; © 2024 De Morgan Foundation, Cannon Hall, Barnsley, S75 4AT.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Evelyn De Morgan attained a vital reputation among artists for having painted scenes of religious values, intensifying social messages through them. Some of the qualities that distinguished her artworks were delicate drawings, the spaciousness of the scene, and the decorative details.
Evelyn De Morgan was a 19th-century Pre-Raphelite of British Nationality who painted extensive scenes with mythological and spiritual backgrounds.
Flora and Medea are Evelyn De Morgan’s most famous paintings depicting Goddess Flora and Medea who turned her magical powers for revenge. Both paintings have an influence of the Early Renaissance and utilize figural beauty as well as accurate expressions to depict their state.
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