Evelyn De Morgan (1855 - 1919)

    After studying at the Slade School in 1873, de Morgan became a pupil of her uncle, Spencer Stanhope. She was greatly influenced by him and Burne-Jones, as well. In 1887, as Evelyn Pickering, she married the Pre-Raphaelite potter William de Morgan.
( "Pre-Raphelite Passion" at Nouveaunet)

    Later, Rossetti inspired a new, younger generation of artists to follow the romantic, medieval type of painting which he himself produced, and these are also called Pre-Raphaelites, and sometimes referred to as the second generation. 
    Most notably they include Edward Coley Burne-Jones and William Morris, and later Simeon Solomon and Evelyn de Morgan. Evelyn de Morgan (born Evelyn Pickering) studied at the Slade school, where she was one of the earliest female students, and then went to live in Italy for some time with her uncle, the painter Spencer Stanhope.
     On her return to Britain, her painting Ariadne in Naxos won great acclaim, and she established herself as a painter of symbolic pictures based on classical mythology. 
    She married William de Morgan, the potter.
    Evelyn de Morgan's work is clearly much influenced by Burne-Jones, and along with the pictures of her contemporaries Marianne Stokes, Eleanor Fortescue Brickdale and Mrs Young Hunter, has much in it of the Pre-Raphaelites. However, de Morgan was also a convert to the Florentine school from her time in Italy, and she especially admired Botticelli. Her soft, fresco-like colours used in figural pictures such as Flora show this influence. Many of her pictures concentrate on just one or two figures, large on the canvas, typically placed on the landscape rather than in it. Her best pictures are the earlier classical subjects in this style. Later, she achieved a greater delicacy of colour, but her compositions became more erratic, and she went into a rapid decline before the First World War, her later pictures being most disappointing. 
    The large Aurora Triumphans is in the Russell Cotes Museum, Bournemouth, and in London there are two highly-worked figural studies in Leighton House. Further work is at the De Morgan Foundation. A portrait by her of her husband is at the National Portrait Gallery.
(From Bob Speel's Homepage)

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