Click on a picture for details

You are in: About the Collection > Paintings

About the De Morgan Centre Paintings

On her seventeenth birthday, August 30th 1872, Evelyn De Morgan wrote in her diary: “At the beginning of each year I say ‘I will do something’ and at the end I have done nothing. Art is eternal, but life is short”. This statement illustrates the themes which were to dominate her adult life and career as a professional artist.

De Morgan was a successful and prolific artist, exhibiting a range of her works from 1877 until her death in 1919. Her style is distinctive in its rich use of colour, allegory and the dominance of the female form. Her paintings display a specific interest in the confinement and limitations of the physical body on earth. Often this is resolved through death.

Her favourite model, Jane Hales, was once her sister’s nursemaid. She is the prototype for most of Evelyn’s women. These contrast noticeably with the women painted by male Pre-Raphaelite artists, such as those by Edward Burne-Jones, who seem to be ephemeral, dreamlike constructions in danger of wilting away. Instead, Evelyn De Morgan presents strong, athletic women, who are beautiful but robust. Jane Hales features as a model in a number of the Centre’s paintings, including The Dryad, Love’s Passing, and By the Waters of Babylon.

Her early works are indebted to the Classical influence taught at the Slade School of Art by Sir Edward Poynter in paintings such as Ariadne in Naxos and Venus and Cupid. After her marriage to William De Morgan, she and William experimented with spiritualism. Themes such as life-after-death, the transformation of the soul, and moral messages about the transitory nature of life dominate her works.

Many of De Morgan’s works have been described as ‘symbolist’. Lux in Tenebris for example, takes a biblical theme of Christ as the Light in the Darkness and substitutes a female figure sitting in an aura of light surrounded by darkness, dressed in pale gold robes, holding out the olive branch of peace. At the foot of the painting, lurking in the turgid waters, are crocodile-beasts. De Morgan allegorises the woman as a metaphor of hope and courage, and also as a figure of divine (female) power.

In the 1880s with the onset of the Boer War, and later in World War 1 in 1914, De Morgan uses her art to express the fears shared by many about the effects and horrors of war. In paintings such as S.O.S. De Morgan combines an anti-war message with her spiritualist beliefs. Here, a lone figure stands on a rocky outcrop in the ocean, beset on all sides by mythological beasts. This can be read as dismay at the encroaching war, and also in terms of De Morgan’s spiritualist belief in the redemptive figure of the female, as a symbol of optimism.

De Morgan’s use of colour is very distinctive. Along with many of the other Pre-Raphaelite artists, Evelyn had visited Italy in order to study the Renaissance Old Masters. The influence of Botticelli can be seen in Flora. Colour is used to represent psychological and esoteric states. Rainbow iridescent shades appear in many of her works. The rainbow was considered in mythology to form a bridge for the soul after death, and this is in keeping with De Morgan’s spiritualism. Other rich colours such as the yellow in The Love Potion suggest a sympathy with the figure of the witch, or red, which is used as a symbol of martyrdom.

De Morgan’s works offer a fascinating insight into key Victorian concerns and ideas. Her lifelong interest in spiritualism is linked to her feminist and anti-war beliefs, and these form the inspiration for many of her works and enable us to understand them in new and revealing ways.

Find out more about some of her work by choosing a link below.

• Flora
• Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund
• The Hour Glass
• Cadmus and Harmonia