Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body

By Elise Lawton Smith

Subjects: Spiritual life, Criticism and interpretation, Allegories, Spiritual life in art, Women in art

Description: "This is a study of the paintings of one of the most significant and prolific Victorian women artists, Evelyn Pickering De Morgan (1855-1919). Just over a hundred paintings and a handful of sculptures are known, and they reveal what her sister-biographer described as an "incessant struggle" to create.". "This study of her work confirms that the idea of progress toward the afterlife is a recurrent motif, arising from a personal involvement in the movement of Spiritualism and paralleling the automatic writing passages in The Result of an Experiment (1909), anonymously published by Evelyn and her husband William De Morgan.". "This book analyzes her exploration of these spiritualist and proto-feminist issues in a series of mythological, literary, and biblical images, in a number of war-related paintings associated with the Boer War and with World War I, and in the allegories for which she is most well known.". "De Morgan's art is illustrated here by 14 color plates and 67 black-and-white images. In addition, reproductions of 50 comparative works, most of them by her contemporaries in England, enhance our understanding of the period."--BOOK JACKET.