EVELYN DE MORGAN EdeM
Painted Dreams: The Art of Evelyn De Morgan
Wolverhampton Art Gallery
Until March 9th
Admission is Free
Addressing the storied lives of the pre modernist Victorians, it’s a little too easy to draw uncanny parallels to these modish days and the unsettling sentiments fomenting. Fabulous wealth for the few, serviced by the remaining chic middle class aesthetes from the Arts and Crafts club. Certain storm clouds gathering… And let’s set aside the unstoried lives of an underclass that unromantically haunt those decontextualized workhouse mills, with their contested-detested memories, that are now annexed to cherished overpriced artisan-culture coffee carrot cake shops. Anyways, as the world’s populists step back into power we could see a resurgence of their gaslit worldview after all. Was it really so bad that your nail making career took your eyesight by 30? Afterall, what a ride it was daily, facing the thrill of the furnace. (Don’t worry, William Morris is still loved in this fetishized late Victorian terrace.)
In 1800s England, Evelyn De Morgan was born rich. People who know people who are born of the rich know, they can do whatever they want. They can defy expectations. More easily. Let’s get it out of the way though, most of the rich never do a damn useful thing at all with their pile. Nothing. Their sole goal is to protect and perpetuate their wealth at the expense of anyone and everyone else while sometimes hypocritically spewing out some sort of ignorant pat liberal rhetoric. They are not change agents.
Evelyn, EdeM, as she sometimes signed her work, defied the restraints of her contemporary cultural norms. Because she just about could. Her mother had no interest in her daughter becoming a painter, saying she wanted “a daughter, not an artist.” And purportedly paid Evelyn’s art instructor to asperse her work in the hopes of discouraging her. Undissuaded, Evelyn persuaded her father to pay for her art studies surreptitiously, under a pseudonym. Later he sanctioned her trip to Europe to swoon over grand masters. Young Victorian women were barely autonomous. Eventually, Evelyn enrolled at the acclaimed Slade School of Art which was groundbreaking in welcoming women to study on equal terms to men. By the time Evelyn was 21, her paintings were being exhibited in London’s more progressive galleries.
Painted Dreams recreates her original 1907 exhibition at the Wolverhampton Gallery, a more than significant milestone in the artist's career. That original show featured 26 paintings and a bronze sculpture. It was the most ambitious event dedicated to a female artist at that time.
“I looked upon her as the first woman artist of her day — if not of all time.” George Frederick Watts, Symbolist sculptor
Many of De Morgan’s most important paintings have been gathered together for the new show and the result is stunning, vivid in detail, spiritual and not without original humour. Her singularity escapes the pre raphaelite world bequeathed to her.
De Morgan rejected materialism and embraced aestheticism. An avowed feminist, a pacifist, horrified by the Boer War, she was also repelled by her early skirmishes with modernist art.
Evelyn had married artist-designer and influential ceramicist, William De Morgan - the lifelong friend of William Morris — whose splendid designs have their own space outside Wolverhampton at Wightwick Manor. Eventually though the game was up for William as his company struggled financially and he moved his hand painted tile business into his mum’s shed. Bailed out by Evelyn, he wrote the best selling novel ‘Joseph Vance’ and lo, everything was dandy with the bank again. You might check the chronology on that.
Painted Dreams is all the more compelling for the collision of political and social upheaval and the sheer eye candy beauty of Evelyn’s pictorial commentary. You can spend a long time taking it all in. There's such joy amongst the upheaval. So much to absorb. And if you’re an out-of-towner up for the show, take the opportunity to trip out to Wolverhampton’s outskirts to see Wightwick Manor, the Arts and Craft house commissioned by the Mander (paint) family. Stuffed with interior decs treasure from the greats. The Old Manor house on the grounds of the property houses the De Morgan Gallery, an exhibition of the work of Evelyn and William De Morgan. If you want, that’s where it starts.
Essential information
Main image - Earthbound (the angel of death, the king scrabbling around for gold a treatise on the lack of agency women had at the time and changing fortunes ahead)
Curated by Sarah Hardy, Director of the De Morgan Museum, and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.
