Evelyn de Morgan Centenary symposium

The De Morgan Foundation is marking the centenary of EDM's death with a symposium at Guildhall Art Gallery on 4 May.

Details here

As the DMF explains, Evelyn De Morgan was a radical Victorian artist who defied her gender and upper-class upbringing to become a commercially successful, professional artist.

Her style developed from Neo-Classical, Italian Renaissance influenced work, which she was taught at the Slade School of Art, to Pre-Raphaelite and then Symbolist canvases, but she never fully subscribed to an art movement, instead using her art to present her socio-political agenda. She painted on themes of women's suffrage, material greed, death, spiritualism and her deep horror at the onset of the First World War, which she abhorred.

These themes are explored in the Symposium's programme.   Speakers include Sarah Hardy of the DMF; Emma Merkling; Nic Peeters; Richenda Roberts; Lucy Ella Rose; and myself.   Partly because there is not a great deal of supporting literature or criticism, scholarship is only just beginning to explore De Morgan's work, and I hope that the Symposium will stimulate more thinking and analysis.    

One of her achievements was  to unsettle Burne-Jones, who after visiting her studio in 1897 grumbled that her paintings were an 'ecletic mixture of Mr Watts and me and old Florentine work ... The colours of some of them are extremely beautiful if you look close in at them, yet at a distance the whole has no beauty of colour at all.  The faces are so pretty with such nice expressions, but the figures are so badly drawn...'  He went on to vent his sense of rivalry.  'if this girl [EDM was over 40] had left figure painting alone and gone about the world modestly and happily doing pretty views, cities, flowers and every beatiful thing she came across in nature, with a cheerful mind ... she would have done admirable and useful work that would have been a pleasure to everybody.  But these pictures are only a bore and an anomaly'. 

Back where you belong, girls! 

Marie Spartali The Lady Prayse-Desire

For  long time, we've been reliant on an old and incorrect colour image of Marie Spartali's early canvas.  in preparation for PRE-RAPHAELITE SISTERS exhibition we have this image  - still a little warm when an e-image but otherwise good.  

And it's time to elucidate the title, which refers to an allegorical figure in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, who personifies Ambition.  This figure is named 'Prays-Desyre' or 'Praise-Desire' because she represents the pursuit of fame and acclaim - aka the desire for praise.  Quite a bold statement from a young female artist.

Spartali's picture is a self-image, with a cartouche showing Athena's owl, referencing her Greek heritage.  The scroll has so far eluded decryption, so if anyone can decipher the broken Greek quotation,  please shout.

Iconically, it sits alongside Burne-Jones's 'Amorous-desire', also taken from Spenser, as an attribute of Venus, with love-arousing power:

That is thy sovereign might, 

O Cyprian queen, which flowing from the beam 

Of thy bright star, thou into them dost stream. 

That is the thing which giveth pleasant grace 

To all things fair, that kindleth lively fire, 

Light of thy lamp, which, shining in the face, 

Thence to the soul darts amorous desire, 

And robs the hearts of those which it admire; 

And of course, EBJ's vision of Desire/ Desiderium is drawn from Maria Zambaco:

Joanna Boyce's paintbox

The most poignant image in the newly-published volumes of the Boyce Papers is a photo of the landscape sketching paintbox that belonged to Joanna Boyce Wells when she died.   It's pocket-sized for use in the field, and has tiny tubes of paint and several re-usable plywood panels about as big as a postcard,  for plein-air sketching, especially of colour.  Here two are visible - the one floating on the left, which has a view of a steep hillside presumably somewhere on the North Downs , and the other lying in the box, showing a tree rising from gorse or bushes.  The panel with almost-abstract colour passages  could represent an Impressionistic flower-filled garden, but as the inside lid of the paintbox it more probably carries various oils from brushes or miniature knife, laid out for use as on a palette.  All come, as it were directly from Joanna's hand, just as she left them.  

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