http://www.artmagick.com/pictures/artist.aspx?artist=evelyn-pickering-de-morgan

Mary Evelyn De Morgan, née Pickering, was a late-Victorian artist who lived and worked in a period marked by cataclysmic changes. Born mid-century in an England ruled over by Queen Victoria, she lived to see a series of changes climaxing in 1914 with the collapse of established world order. It was amidst this atmosphere of increasing uncertainty and anxiety that De Morgan came to maturity and developed her personal and artistic philosophies. Throughout her career as a painter, she used literary allusion and allegory to express her strongly held views on contemporary spiritual, social and moral issues.

Despite initial parental disapproval of her chosen career, Evelyn was a privileged woman. She enjoyed an upper-class lifestyle in London; excellent home education; instruction at the South Kensington National Art Training School (1872) and at the Slade School of Art (1873-76) under Edward J. Poynter. She had the artistic as well as moral support of her uncle, the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope (1829-1908). These advantages, when combined with Evelyn’s prodigious talent and early decision to devote her life to art, moulded a temperament that was confident and not easily deterred by obstacles such as familial apathy, the condescension of male artists and critics, and lack of robust patronage.

In the early 1880s, Evelyn moved her studio from her family home in Bryanston Square to the popular Trafalgar Studios in Manresa Road, Chelsea. During this period, she lived as a professional artist in London with periodic trips to Italy where she would absorb the influences of the early Italian masters. While it is likely that she spent much of this period of her life perfecting her craft, she also took an active part in the artistic/social scene of the day. With friends such as Violet Paget, Emily Susan Ford, Margaret Burne-Jones and Mary De Morgan, she attended the theatre, Royal Academy openings and art studio open-house events.

Some time during the mid 1880s she met the ceramic designer William De Morgan (1839-1917) and his family. This introduction to the bohemian and intellectual De Morgan family was clearly a turning point in her life. Her future mother-in-law, the spiritualist and social activist Sophia Frend De Morgan (1809-1892) became her informal mentor, helping to further develop the younger woman’s interest in spiritualist practices and in social reform.

In 1887 Evelyn married William De Morgan. Despite the age difference theirs was a harmonious and mutually supportive marriage. In addition to their artistic pursuits, they shared a well-documented sense of humour and an idealistic spirit.

Their mutual interests included social reform, spiritualism and music. Evelyn provided financial and moral support for her husband’s pottery business, which though successful required much capital.

From the early 1890s, in the interest of William’s health, Evelyn enthusiastically accompanied him on extended stays to Florence every winter. As fellow artists, they led an idyllic life in Italy: Evelyn created her pictures, while William worked on his ceramic designs with the Italian painters he had hired. The De Morgans spent their weekends in the hills above Florence, at the sumptuous Bellosguardo villa where Spencer Stanhope had made his permanent home.

During her lifetime Evelyn De Morgan produced approximately 102 oil paintings and over 300 drawings. At first glance, works like Flora (1894), Cadmus and Harmonia (1877), Eos (1895) and Night and Sleep (1878) appear to be that of a typical mid-century literary painter influenced by the work of Spencer Stanhope, Watts and Burne-Jones. Consequently, this was the way in which most contemporary critics assessed her paintings: Many do reflect the usual conventions and literary subjects of late Victorian art with its Pre-Raphaelite traces and neo-classical tendencies. However, looking closer, one discovers Symbolist works that employ the language of Christian allegory to reveal the artist’s engagement with the contemporary issues of her time.

Because of the nexus between spiritualism and feminism during the late Victorian era, Evelyn, like her fellow female artists, sought new heroines with which to construct her own images of Victorian womanhood. Hence, she painted portraits of strong-minded biblical and classical women such as Ruth and Naomi, the Virgin Mary, Medea, Ariadne, Cassandra and Helen of Troy. In addition to these portrayals, Evelyn sought a new heroic female type, which could embody spiritual empowerment. For Evelyn, who had struggled to overcome the limitations of gender and class to find fulfillment, the figure of the female martyr seems to have become a particularly apt symbol of feminine spiritual power and social responsibility.

These works may be divided into three categories: spiritualist allegories, depictions of sacred heroines, and war paintings. In 1914, as war approached, Evelyn and William De Morgan left Italy for the last time and returned to Chelsea to live and work. The Great War of 1914-1918 unnerved both these idealists, whose lives had been devoted to art and beauty.Despite her horror of war, Evelyn did not shrink from recording her response. Again she used the language of Christian allegory to paint pictures representing violence, pain, loss and, finally, redemption.

William De Morgan died, probably of influenza, in 1917. Evelyn lived on until 1919, painting and attending to William’s artistic legacy. She lived to see the end of the war, but not the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1916, her last exhibition was held at her Chelsea studio. It included works such as S.O.S (s.d.), 1914 (1914), The Field of the Slain (s.d.) and The Red Cross (s.d.) and was organized for the benefit of the British and Italian Red Cross.

An Angel pipping to the Souls in Hell

Aurora Triumphans

Boreas and Oreithya

Cadmus and Harmonia

Cassandra Clytie

Dejanera Eos

Earthbound

Flora Gloria in Excelsis

Helen of Troy Hero holding the beacon for Lender

Hope in the Prison of Despair

Love’s Passing

Our Lady of PeaceLuna

Lux in Tenebris

Medeea

Mercury Phosphorus and Hesperis

Night and Sleep

Port after Stormy Seas--Spencer’s Faerie Queene

Queen Eleanor and Fair Rosamund

SOS The Dryad

The Angel of Death

The Crown of Glory

The Cadence of Autumn

The Captives

The Field of the Slain

The Gilded Cage

The Hour Glass The Love Potion

The Prisoner

Tobias and the Angel

TheRed Cross(Allegoryof FlanderWar Graves)

The Sea Maidens

The Storm Spirit

The Valley of Shadows

The Vision