
Evelyn De Morgan (1855–1919) defied Victorian expectations to become one of the era's finest painters. Born Mary Evelyn Pickering into London's upper class, she dropped her first name because it could be read as feminine, wanting her work judged on merit alone. On her seventeenth birthday, she wrote in her diary: "Art is eternal, but life is short... I have not a moment to lose."
She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she was among the first women admitted, winning multiple prizes and a scholarship. Her uncle, the painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, introduced her to the Pre-Raphaelite circle. Visits to Florence with him exposed her to Botticelli and Quattrocento masters, whose influence appears throughout her work.
De Morgan's paintings feature female figures in spiritual, mythological, and allegorical themes, using metaphors of light and darkness, transformation, and bondage. Scholars identify feminist and spiritualist content in her symbolic imagery. In 1877, she was one of only two women exhibiting at the Grosvenor Gallery's inaugural show. She was active in the suffragette movement, signing the 1889 Declaration in Favor of Women's Suffrage. In 1887, she married ceramicist William De Morgan; profits from her paintings financed his pottery business. Her later work addressed war from a pacifist perspective, responding to the Boer War and World War I. She completed around 100 oil paintings over her fifty-year career. The De Morgan Foundation preserves 56 of them, along with preparatory drawings. She died in 1919 and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery.
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