Evelyn De Morgan

Evelyn De Morgan (30 August 1855 – 2 May 1919), was an English painter associated early in her career with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement. Her paintings are figural, foregrounding the female body through the use of spiritual, mythological, and allegorical themes. They rely on a range of metaphors (such as light and darkness, transformation, and bondage) to express what several scholars have identified as spiritualist and feminist content. Her later works also deal with the themes of war from a pacifist perspective, engaging with conflicts like the Second Boer War and World War I. She was born Mary Evelyn Pickering at 6 Grosvenor Street, to upper middle-class parents Percival Pickering QC, the Recorder of Pontefract, and Anna Maria Wilhelmina Spencer Stanhope, the sister of the artist John Roddam Spencer Stanhope and a descendant of Coke of Norfolk who was an Earl of Leicester. De Morgan took up drawing lessons at the age of 15 and was wildly dedicated to her craft as evidenced by a passage in her diary on her 17th birthday "Art is eternal, but life is short I will make up for it now I have not a moment to lose". Other passages in her diary record her "hours of steady work" and chastising herself for wasting time with silly things like changing her dress or going for tea. De Morgans mother was quite insistent that Evelyn should be introduced to high society but she firmly refused and threatened that if she ever had the chance she would kick the Queen. With prospects of joining high society behind her De Morgan enrolled at the South Kensington National Art Training School at the age of seventeen. A year later she moved on to the Slade School of Art, where women had only recently begun to be admitted. At Slade, she was awarded the prestigious Slade Scholarship and won several awards before moving off to study under symbolist painter George Frederic Watts and her uncle John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, who had a great influence on her visual style. After some time studying the masters of the Renaissance De Morgans art began moving further away from the classics as she developed her own matured particular style. De Morgan began close relationships with the Pre-Raphaelite movement which many of her paintings are considered to be a part of.