Evelyn De Morgan and the Triumph of Drapery

The fabrics swirl, billow, ripple and cling.... the colours are gorgeous, the atmosphere often dreamlike. It is a feast for the eyes. 

We've come to see Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the very heart of the City. It's a bit of a misnomer, that title, because De Morgan's work doesn't really convey much of an impression of modernity, certainly not in the sense of late 19th-century technological and scientific progress. The style is reminiscent in many ways of the Pre-Raphaelites from earlier in the Victorian era, and Edward Burne-Jones in particular. 

But what was modern about Evelyn De Morgan was in fact the most obvious thing about her; she was a woman, in what was still a very male art world.  

Before we get into De Morgan's history, let's start with a painting to give a flavour of her art, and it's one of the most spectacular in this exhibition: The Storm Spirits. Just pause for a moment to take in the splendour of the classical drapery, the poses and the wings, not to mention the hair! And it's a large painting too, nearly six feet across. 

We learn from the wall caption that the three female figures represent rain, thunder and lightning, brewing up a gigantic storm on an apparently treacherous rocky coastline. But at the very centre of the painting, we can glimpse a small area of calm beyond the tempest. De Morgan painted this picture in 1900, amid the turmoil of the Boer War, and that safe haven may signal a hope for the resolution of the conflict. 

Mary Evelyn Pickering was born into a prosperous upper middle-class family in London in 1855. Educated at home with her brothers, she showed artistic talent from an early age. Evelyn's artist uncle, Roddam, encouraged her in her ambitions to become a professional artist, despite her mother's opposition and the social norms of the time.

In the early 1870s, she was one of the first women to enrol in the Slade School of Art. She also began to use her gender-neutral middle name, in an endeavour to be judged by those not in the know on a level playing-field with male artists. (The change of surname came later, when she married the Arts & Crafts designer, ceramicist and author William De Morgan.)

And she started to enjoy success, with works inspired by Greek mythology and by the Italian Renaissance. This next work, from her mid-20s, depicts a scene from Goethe's Faust, featuring the four female characters of Care, Want, Debt and Need. Now, if all this subject matter sounds a little heavy, recalling some of the worst of the Pre-Raphs, De Morgan's touch doesn't generally come across as oppressive.   

The Grey Sisters offers cool colours, calm poses and relatively restrained outfits. But there's an abundance of delightful detail -- the spiked railings, the background with the bent trees shaped by the wind and the crenellated towers. The flowers in the foreground on the left recall those of the Northern Renaissance -- Robert Campin or Jan van Eyck.

Another striking early work is Love's Passing, an interpretation of an elegy by the Latin poet Tibullus, imagining the anguish he would suffer if his beloved died before he did. What a romantic image. There they are, a book of poetry open, absorbed in the music of love. But behind them, by the bridge, an older woman walks in the company of the Angel of Death. 

Evelyn, we're told, had just met William, 16 years her senior....

The Angel of Death also makes an appearance in Earthbound, about to lay hands on an oblivious aged king with his concentration firmly on his pile of gold coins. 

Sorry, Your Majesty, but that fortune will be no use to you very shortly. Again, the drapery is astonishing, even if the proportions of the figures are possibly a little fanciful. 

There may be less fabric to swirl in Luna, but the ropes more than make up for it, with all those coils and loops.

An image that recalls those late 19th-century French advertising posters we saw at the Musée d'Orsay a few weeks back. 

Amid all the swirling fabric, there's also a fairly surprising amount of bare flesh -- both male and female -- in De Morgan's work, and perhaps most strikingly so in the not-quite-life-size painting that occupies a prominent position in the exhibition, Boreas and Oreithyia.  In Greek mythology, Boreas, the ill-tempered god of the north wind, abducted Oreithyia, daughter of the King of Athens. 

Boreas is represented as usual as a winged man of mature age, but De Morgan veers away from the standard image and makes him a more sensitive and kind-looking character. Her model was Alessandro di Marco, who was reaching the end of his professional career yet who still conformed to the artistic ideals of masculine beauty.

De Morgan's depiction is not so much one of violent kidnapping as of dreamy romantic sensuality, the fair princess whisked away by a tall dark handsome stranger. 

You don't get to see De Morgan's gorgeous Night and Sleep at the Guildhall, but we found this a very satisfying exhibition, even though it's somewhat confusingly laid out and some of the wall captions don't always make logical sense. Just let the colour and the fabrics envelop you....

Practicalities 

Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London is on at the Guildhall Art Gallery in the City of London until January 4. It's open daily from 1000 to 1700. You can pay what you like to see this exhibition -- or indeed pay nothing at all; there's a contactless-card terminal and a box for notes and coins at the end of the show so you can decide then how much it was worth. We spent a bit less than an hour going round. The gallery is right next to the Guildhall itself, just off Gresham St; Moorgate, Bank and St Paul's are the nearest rail and Tube stations.

Images

Evelyn De Morgan (1855-1919), The Storm Spirits, 1900

Evelyn De Morgan, The Grey Sisters, 1880-81
Evelyn De Morgan, Love's Passing, 1883-84
Evelyn De Morgan, Earthbound, 1897
Evelyn De Morgan, Luna, 1885
Evelyn De Morgan, Boreas and Oreithyia, 1896 
All paintings from the De Morgan Foundation