Evelyn De Morgan, Painter of the Spirit

Evelyn De Morgan. “Medea”. Oil on canvas, 1889

That the world of painting has always been predominantly male is, unfortunately, a fact, but this also applies to literature or photography. There are not many women who have left their names in the history of art, even if some of them are famous worldwide. Few names above all are Artemisia Gentilieschi, Tamara De Lempicka and Frida Kahlo.

For honor and respect, however, we should also remember Sofonisba Anguissola, the first portraitist in history who lived between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; Lavinia Fontana, who lived in the same period; Berthe Morisot, a rare female voice among the Impressionists together with the Austrian Tina Blau.

Other women have shone over the centuries but whose art is known only to experts.

Here I want to talk about another painter, little known, but whom I particularly love because she is part of one of my favorite styles: the Pre-Raphaelites.

A passion born at the time of high school, thanks to the hours of History of Art. Having attended the Institute of Publicity Graphics, if on the one hand, it did not give me the opportunity to study classical languages and philosophy, on the other hand, it made me know and appreciate the History of Art and Psychology, subjects among my favorites together with Literature.

The term Pre-Raphaelites, for all those who love Shakespeare, means the appearance before the eyes of Ophelia in the waters, the symbolic painting of the whole movement, painted by John Everett Millais in 1851, and which has become an icon and cover of almost all the “Hamlet” published around the world.

The Pre-Raphaelite movement was founded in 1848 as a secret society that rejected the classical ideals and the dominant artistic dictates of the time with a more spiritual and naturalistic approach.

Founded at the beginning by Millais, William H. Hunt and Dante Gabriele Rossetti, the group later became a brotherhood of poets, critics, and painters, who saw in Raphael the emblem of classical and affected art that they repudiated, drawing more inspiration from everything that came before him, hence the name Pre-Raphaelite.

Especially the Middle Ages and the art of the fifteenth century, with its vivid colors, the interest in themes such as death, spirituality, nature, love that will anticipate Symbolism and other adjacent movements.

Among these rebellious young twenties, who hated and fought with art the conventional impositions of the Royal Academy, was Evelyn De Morgan, one of the artists – along with Kate Bunce, Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale and Marie Spartali Stillman – attracted by the pre-Raphaelite style.

 

Evelyn De Morgan

She was born on August 30, 1855, in London to upper-class parents, she was home-educated and began taking painting lessons at the age of 15. On the morning of her seventeenth birthday, she noted in her diary: “Art is eternal, but life is short. Now I will fix it, I don't have a moment to lose.”

It was she who asked her parents to be enrolled in an art school and eventually agreed by enrolling her, in 1873, at the Slade School of Fine Art, but it was her uncle John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, a Pre-Raphaelite painter, who inspired her most, during visits to his Florentine villa, where she also had the opportunity to study Renaissance artists, Botticelli above all.

This led her to abandon the classic style of the School to develop her own style, with a strong spiritualist imprint, especially after her marriage in 1887 with the potter and novelist William De Morgan, collaborator of William Morris and son of Sophia E. De Morgan writer of “From Matter to Spirit” (1863).

They both practiced automatic writing together every night for many years of their marriage, communicating with spirits.

Evelyn was rebellious from her youth, signed the Declaration in favor of women's suffrage in 1889 and strongly opposed to her official debut in society as her parents wanted, to which she replied one day: “No one will drag me out with a halter round my neck to sell me!”

But it was after the wedding that her style became deeper and more symbolic.

Themes like death, light and shadow, human passions, took shape in her always feminine subjects.

Angels, mythological women, protagonists of Greek or allegorical tragedies, which reflected various spiritual themes such as the progress of the spirit, the materialism of life on earth, and the imprisonment of the soul in the earthly body.

Evelyn De Morgan. “Helen of Troy”. Oil on canvas, 1898

 

Among my favorites is “Medea”, from 1889.

One of the most famous and controversial characters of Greek mythology. Her name in Greek means “cunning”, in fact, the tradition describes her as a sorceress endowed with divine powers, celebrated by Euripides and Ovid. Madly in love with Jason, she will kill by poisoning her – or by burning her with a magical robe – the pity Glauce, daughter of King Creon who had betrothed her to Jason.

In the De Morgan Medea painting, she walks through the luxurious rooms with a long red dress, a symbol of royalty but also of jealousy and Jason's betrayal. In her hand the bottle with the poison, and on the floor, the red roses as a symbol of love and of the blood that will be shed.

The wounded love makes her sad in the eyes because it aroused in her the cruelty she had stifled.

It is no coincidence that the painting was exhibited at the New Gallery in 1890 with a quote from William Morris's poem:

“Day by day
she saw the happiness dissolve
and how she fell out of those happy moments
the creator began to return
of terrible things she had once been.”

The artist's passion for spiritism and communication with spirits remains intriguing. In art, she had sought that passage towards a reality capable of freeing the body and feelings, even the darkest and most terrible ones.

Where men tried to re-establish painting with their bravado and numerous, Evelyn reached heights of sublime painting, in solitude with her husband, dragging the passions of the spirit onto the canvas, with one foot in the world of the dead.

I think her work and her personality are worth knowing.

 

Evelyn De Morgan died on 2 May 1919 in London, two years after her husband's death, and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking, Surrey. Their gravestone bears an inscription from “The Result of an Experiment”, written together with the husband:

“Sorrow is only of the flesh / The life of the spirit is joy.”

 

Evelyn De Morgan. “The Soul's Prison”. Oil on canvas, 1888

Italian version