Of course, this should not matter, since a great deal of Western art carries the same message without its worth being doubted. But nineteenth-century Spiritualism is more difficult, and Elise Lawton Smith has to work hard to convince us that variation on the theme that “Earth life is dull, cold, grey and the spirit is cramped in the prison of clay, but outside the sun of the spirit spheres shine….Look up and trust in the light” are a good reason for valuing pictorial renderings of such mystical vapourings.

When Evelyn Pickering married ceramicist William De Morgan in 1887, she also moved closer to his mother, Sophia De Morgan, author of From Matter to Spirit: A Record of Ten Years’ Experience in Spirit Manifestations (1863), a key account of communications from “beyond” based partly on Swedenborgian ideas. And soon the two artists sat down each evening for a session of “automatic writing” to see if they too could receive spirit messages. It sounds like daily prayers or meditation. The resulting words were much as expected, though intermittent, and published anonymously in 1909 as The Result of an Experiment. The couple preferred to keep their beliefs private, although plainly these gave Evelyn her inspiration as well as her subjects.

Judy Oberhausen opened this particular topic in her Spring 1994 JPRS article, “Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and Spiritualism: An Interpretive Link,” and again in the catalogue Evelyn De Morgan: Oil Paintings, edited by Catherine Gordon (London: De Morgan Foundation, 1996). In the present study, Smith treats it at length, with sometimes overlong pictorial descriptions linked to quotations from Spiritualist texts, including The Result. The works are discussed thematically, which underlines the essential stasis in De Morgan’s oeuvre, despite the visible, if limited stylistic variety of its forms, from the Botticellian to the Michelangesque, or the Neo-classical to the murkily Symbolist.

De Morgan’s compositions range from the ever-popular single female in clinging drapery, through pairs and trios of linked figures such as the striking vertical group of Night with her Children Sleep and Death (1883), to cinematic set-pieces like St. Christina Giving Her Jewels to the Poor (1904), Blindness and Cupidity Chasing Joy from the City (1897), and The Kingdom of Heaven Suffereth Violence (1910?) in which tiers of flying women rise through an apocalyptic sky of winged heads, dark below, celestial pink above. As I have always thought, the religio-symbolic aspect of De Morgan’s art came into its own with World War I, when texts proclaiming that “my mind shows me shadows of men struggling with ugliness and groveling in the mire, and others struggling to catch the light from other suns” connect expressively with the context and potent images of The Field of the Slain (c. 1915) and The Red Cross (c. 1916), translating historical realities into expressive allegory far more successfully than sometimes risible personifications like Boreas and the Fallen Leaves (1896). Moreover, the works protesting or lamenting war also allowed De Morgan herself to connect with the public realm, because they were collected together in a 1916 studio exhibition in aid of the then-fledgling Red Cross, which must have seemed like a small ray of spiritual light amid almost cosmic destruction.

The book is well and copiously illustrated (though annoyingly no dimensions are given) with comparative illustrations from Blake, G. F. Watts, Spencer Stanhope, Phoebe Traquair, and others. Both Blake and Traquair shared ideas similar to De Morgan’s, and one regrets that the “spirit drawings” of Anna Mary Howitt have not yet been adduced in a study of the Swedenborgian line of descent that threads through British Art. And although Smith states that “unfortunately, we have no direct indication of Burne-Jones’s response to her art,” surely it is De Morgan’s Life and Thought that he verbally trashed on 12 June 1897, after visiting the studio of “a lady” whose work he described as “a kind of eclectic mixture of Mr Watts and me and Old Florentine work.” Though beautifully drawn and finished, it was “all hopeless confusion,” showing a “knock-kneed impotent knight” with a lady coming out of a cave [sic] and meeting reason – “Life and Aspiration I think it was called.” (See Burne-Jones Talking, ed. Mary Lago [London: John Murray, 1982], 1-19.)

A few quibbles. The National Art Training School was not previously the Female School of Design and was not located in Bloomsbury but South Kensington. It is unclear why Smith feels the five naked Sea Maidens (1885-86) to be such a flat failure in comparison with various other expressionless interlinked lasses, especially since she otherwise refrains from aesthetic judgments throughout. Her analyses are sometimes unsecured, as when she writes that “while none of the women [in The Kingdom of Heaven] help or even look at each other, I expect that we are meant to recognize their connection with each other”; and also repetitive: adjacent paragraphs tell us twice that Luna’s ropes are plentiful but loose while the passage about men “groveling in the mire” is quoted in full at least three times.

This is overall a thorough account, however, of De Morgan’s output in terms that the artist would, generally speaking, recognize. She, and historians, might disagree with claims for a feminist presentation of female figures, but there is food for debate here, which will increase the level of critical attention, continue the process of assessing her works, and open potential lines of new inquiry, such as De Morgan’s apparently undocumented solo show in Germany in 1902, her use of poems by Alice Fleming (sister of Rudyard Kipling and niece of Georgie Burne-Jones), and the whole up-and-down question of her reputation. While this study makes a convincing case for taking her beliefs seriously, there is happily more to Evelyn De Morgan than her Spirit vision. Moreover, now that her pictures have moved from Old Battersea House to a proper display space with the De Morgan Foundation, there is a location and a stimulus for future research and elucidation.

–Jan Marsh, The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, Spring 2003

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