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. The Slade was revolutionary in allowing female students to study from life alongside their male colleagues, with this ability to study the human form proving fundamental in Evelyn’s artistic development. 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. Her paintings are figural, foregrounding the female body through the use of spiritual, mythological and allegorical themes.

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 in 1855, Evelyn de Morgan, née Pickering, was an English painter
associated with the late Pre-Raphaelite Movement as well as Aestheticism and Symbolism who defied the expectations of her class and gender. She was born into a landowning family, educated at home alongside her brothers, studying Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian, as well as classical literature and mythology at the insistence of her mother.

From an early age Evelyn De Morgan 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). She rebelled against any efforts to turn her into an ‘idle’ woman, threatening to ‘kick the Queen’ should her mother attempt
to present her to society.

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. It was through her uncle that she was introduced to George Frederic Watts and would often visit him in his studio home, Little Holland House. Overcoming initial parental opposition, Evelyn enrolled at the newly formed Slade School in 1873, one of the first women to do so. Whilst at Slade she won a number of prestigious awards including the Prize and Silver Medal for Painting from the Antique, First Certificate for Drawing from the Antique and Third Equal Certificate for Composition.

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 on her own, De Morgan often supported her husband’s less lucrative pottery business. The couple often collaborated, with Evelyn actively contributing ideas to her husband’s ceramic designs and practising ‘automatic writing’ (a claimed psychic ability allowing communication with spirits) together.

De Morgan supported the suffrage movement and was a pacifist, protesting the horrors of the First World War and Boer War in over fifteen different paintings.

De Morgan passed away in 1919, two years after her husband. The couple were buried in Brookwood Cemetery with the headstone designed by
Evelyn and inscribed ‘Sorrow is only of the flesh/ The life of the spirit is
joy’, a line taken from the couple’s collaborative work The Result of an
Experiment’.