Evelyn De Morgan Biography | Oil Paintings

Evelyn De Morgan was homeschooled and started drawing lessons when she was fifteen. When she was seventeen, she persuaded her parents to let her go to art school. At first, they discouraged it, but the next year she was enrolled at the Slade School of Art with a three-year financial assistance scholarship. But, the scholarship required that she draw nudes using charcoal and she did not like working with that medium, she declined the scholarship, and her parents were not happy.

Evelyn De Morgan was also a pupil of her uncle John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, who was a great influence on her works. Beginning in 1875, when she was twenty, Evelyn often visited him in Florence where he lived. This also enabled her to study the great artists of the Renaissance, she was especially enamored with the works of Sandro Botticelli. This influenced her to move away from the established subjects supported by the Slade school and to make her style. Evelyn De Morgan had her first exhibit in 1877 at London's Grosvenor Gallery and continued to show her paintings there, thereafter.

That same year she married the ceramicist William De Morgan and they spent their lives together in London. Evelyn De Morgan, a pacifist, expressed her horror at the First World War and South African War in over fifteen war paintings including The Red Cross and S.O.S. Money was unimportant to De Morgan, relative to her artistic pursuits, any profits from sales of her paintings went toward helping her husband's pottery business and she actively contributed ideas to his ceramics designs. She died two years after he did.

Art Movement: Pre-Raphaelite.
Artists Influencing Evelyn De Morgan: John Roddam Spencer Stanhope.
She Traveled To Italy.
Artist Biography compiled by Albert L. Mansour at The World's Artist, with text adapted from Wikipedia.