Evelyn De Morgan

Evelyn Pickering De Morgan (1855-1919) was the female pre-Raphaelite painter, considered by some of her contemporaries to be the best female painter ever. She was one of those nineteenth-century characters, deeply involved in spiritualism, political reform, pacifism, and feminism. Her husband, William De Morgan, was a ceramicist, involved in the same causes as his wife. Together they produced a once-famous book of automatic writing, The Result of an Experiment (1909). Above, Clytie, 1886.

Some of her pictures are full of light and flowers and remind one of Botticelli; not by coincidence, since she and her husband spent every winter in Florence and she was a great admirer of the Renaissance Italians. Above, Flora, 1894.

Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund, 1905.

I find myself more drawn to her darker paintings, like Night and Sleep, 1878.

The Angel of Death, 1890.

Demeter Mourning for Persephone, 1906.

Hope in a Prison of Despair, 1884. More paintings here.

But what inspired me to write this post was these paintings, De Morgan's response to World War I. In S O S (1915) and The Field of the Slain (1916), an elderly refugee from the optimistic Victorian age confronted the horror of total war, and a believer in spiritualism imagined a world of darkness.

The tomb she designed for her and her husband in 1918.