🖌️🎨 Evelyn De Morgan-Pickering (1885-1919)

 🖌️🎨 Evelyn De Morgan-Pickering (1885-1919) was an English innovative artist, a follower of the Pre-Raphaelites, the wife of the famous ceramic artist William de Morgan (a friend of William Morris), and the niece of the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Spencer Stanhope.
Style: Pre-Raphaelism, Symbolism.
Subject and objects: portraits, nudes, genre, mythological, literary and allegorical scenes.
Evelyn was a feminist who challenged male chauvinism and class prejudices, a pacifist and a spiritualist.
Despite the obvious influence of her uncle, the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Spencer Stanhope, she managed to create an original pictorial world, in the center of which she placed female images.
Mysticism, allegory, spiritualism are the obvious interests of the artist. Her style is also noted: unique plasticity, proportions of figures, clearly defined lines of outfits, carefully painted draperies, color scheme with a predominance of complex crimson, burgundy and pink tones - all this makes her works recognizable. During her creative career, Evelyn de Morgan created more than 50 paintings. Evelyn Pickering was homeschooled, like many middle-class women, and began taking drawing lessons at the age of 15. She then studied at the National School of Art in South Kensington, and at 18 she became one of the first women to enter the Slade School of Art, where her teacher was Sir Edward Poynter. Evelyn often won prizes at competitions and began exhibiting early in London's Dudley and Grosvenor Galleries, which favored women artists. Her early success may have been due to her gender-neutral surname.
After graduating from the Slade School, Evelyn Pickering went to Florence to visit her uncle, the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Spencer Stanhope. After this trip, Evelyn's paintings acquired a new sound, the artist began to use bright colors, allegories and almost always depicted female figures. Her favorite model was her sister's nanny, Jane Hales, who became the prototype for most of the female figures in Evelyn's paintings - strong, athletic and robust.
In 1887, Evelyn Pickering married ceramic artist William de Morgan, a close friend of the famous designer William Morris. Under the influence of her husband's mother, the famous spiritualist Sophia de Morgan, the couple became interested in trance automatic writing, which was fashionable at the time, and in 1909 they published a collection of transcripts, Results of an Experiment. Allegorical echoes of this book, interest in spiritualism, references to the problems of spiritual blindness and the struggle for enlightenment are heard in many of the artist's paintings.
The de Morgans lived their entire lives in London, and very modestly; the money from the sale of Evelyn's paintings went to her husband's research in the field of pottery technology (at the end of his life, William de Morgan gave up ceramics and became famous as a writer).
The president of the Royal Academy and Evelyn's teacher, Sir Edward Poynter, considered the couple "two of the rarest souls of their era." The couple participated in the suffragette movement: Evelyn signed the "Declaration in Favor of Women's Suffrage" in 1889, and William demonstrated his support by serving as vice-president of the "Men's League for Women's Suffrage" in 1913.
The horrors of the Boer War and the tragedy of the First World War were taken to heart by the pacifist Evelyn de Morgan, who expressed her attitude to these tragedies of humanity in a "war series" of 15 paintings.
Evelyn de Morgan died two years after her husband, on May 2, 1919.

Sources: Arthive; infobae.com;