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!