Study of a Standing Female Nude

Once she had graduated from the Slade School of Art, Evelyn continued to draw every day for the rest of her life. Her drawings are enlightening not only for their skill and subject matter, but also for their ability to teach us her working process. From loose compositional sketches, Evelyn swiftly progressed to detailed life studies for the figures in her paintings. Choosing to draw mainly on a grey wove paper in pencil and pastel, Evelyn produced hundreds of figure studies. Her rigorously-examined double studies of clothed and nude figures are particularly fascinating and underline the artist’s obsession with the human form and her desire for accuracy. A deep understanding of anatomy is obvious in this drawing and looking at the work you feel as though you can reach out and feel the muscle and bone under the skin, that you could feel the pulse of life through the soft skin.

Evelyn de Morgan

Born into a landowning family, from an early age Evelyn De Morgan, née Pickering, demonstrated a precocious artistic talent and a passionate desire to pursue a career as an artist, writing in her diary on her seventeenth birthday ‘Art is eternal, life is short… I have not a moment to lose’ (Evelyn De Morgan’s Diary, 30 August 1872, De Morgan Foundation Archive). Her maternal uncle, the artist John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope encouraged her talents and accompanied her on her first formative journeys to Italy where she discovered the Renaissance masters, particularly Botticelli. Overcoming initial parental opposition, Evelyn enrolled at the newly formed Slade School in 1873, one of the first women to do so.

The Slade revolutionised women’s artistic education by allowing female students to study the nude from life alongside their male counterparts. Whilst at the Slade she began to submit work under her middle name Evelyn, rather than her Christian name Mary, as its gender ambiguity offered a chance for her work to be judged on its own merit.

One of her tutors, Edward Poynter was a leading artist of the Aesthetic movement, which emphasised the importance of beauty over narrative, characterised by Baudelaire's phrase 'art for art’s sake'. De Morgan’s adherence to the Aesthetic style in her early career helped ensure commercial success and in 1877, still aged only twenty-one, she was invited to contribute to the first exhibition at the Grosvenor Gallery. In 1884 she met the ceramicist William De Morgan, who became a prominent figure in the Arts & Crafts movement. The De Morgans married in 1887 and settled at The Vale in Chelsea, where they lived until 1910. Financially successful in her own time, De Morgan often supported her husband’s less lucrative pottery business.