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Nude figures

Artist: De Morgan, Evelyn

Study of an angel

Artist: De Morgan, Evelyn

Study for ‘Aurora Triumphans’

Artist: De Morgan, Evelyn

This initial sketch for one of Evelyn’s earliest works bears little resemblance to the composition of the final painting where the three trumpeting angels are posed in more dynamic stances and two further figures have been positioned in the foreground.

Sketch of ‘Venus and Cupid’

Artist: De Morgan, Evelyn

This compositional study by Evelyn De Morgan for her oil painting of the same subject is a small pencil sketch is vigorously drawn with bold outlines. Whilst the concept for the painting did not change, from initial sketch to final execution in oil elements it did, in particular the form of Cupid’s wings and the added embellishment of the seashells which appear in the final work. Cupid’s figure is also in an altered pose, his bended knee and extended neck appears much more beseeching than the rather aloof figure that appears in Evelyn’s final painting.

Study of a female head

Artist: De Morgan, Evelyn

Study of a female head in pastel

Study of a female head in profile

Artist: De Morgan, Evelyn

Study of a female head in profile facing right in pastel

Baptism of Christ after Verrocchio and Leonardo Da Vinci

Artist: De Morgan, Evelyn

‘The Baptism of Christ’ is a painting finished around 1475 in the studio of the Italian Renaissance painter Andrea del Verrocchio and generally ascribed to him and his pupil Leonardo da Vinci. Some art historians discern the hands of other members of Verrocchio’s workshop in the painting as well. The picture depicts the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist as recorded in the Biblical Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The angel to the left is recorded as having been painted by the youthful Leonardo, a fact which has excited so much special comment and mythology, that the importance and value of the picture as a whole and within the œuvre of Verrocchio is often overlooked. Modern critics also attribute much of the landscape in the background and the figure of Christ to Leonardo da Vinci as well. The painting is housed in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Andrea del Verrocchio was a sculptor, goldsmith, and painter who ran a large and successful workshop in Florence in the second half of the 15th Century. Among his apprentices and close associates were the painters Botticelli, Botticini, Lorenzo di Credi, and Leonardo da Vinci. Verrocchio was not himself a prolific painter and very few pictures are attributed to his hand, his fame lying chiefly in his sculptured works. Verrocchio’s paintings, as are typical of Florentine works of that date, are in tempera on wooden panel. The technique of painting artworks in oil paint, previously used in Italy only for durable items like parade shields, was introduced to Florence by Dutch and Flemish painters and their imported works at around the date that this painting was created. The painting ‘The Baptism of Christ’ was, according to Antonio Billi (1515), commissioned by the Church of S. Salvi, and was later transferred to the Vallumbrosan Sisterhood in Santa Verdiana. In 1810 it entered the collection of the Accademia and passed to the Uffizi in 1959. In the 16th Century the work was discussed in Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Painters’ in the biographies of both Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci.

Arm studies

Artist: De Morgan, Evelyn