Evelyn De Morgan

Evelyn De Morgan, born Mary Evelyn Pickering on 30 August 1855 in London, was educated largely at home, where tutors gave her an unusually advanced classical education in Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, literature, mythology, and science. She began formal drawing lessons at age fifteen, receiving tutoring from her uncle, the painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, and enrolled in 1872 at the South Kensington National Art Training School, today the Royal College of Art, where she stayed only a matter of months before finding its emphasis on decorative "accomplishment" for women too restrictive.

In 1873 she entered the newly founded Slade School of Art, among the first women admitted, and studied there under Edward Poynter until about 1876. She won the Slade Scholarship in her first year and went on to take prizes and medals for painting and drawing from the antique and for composition. During her time at the Slade she also traveled to Italy to study Old Master painting, an experience that shaped the classicizing figure style of her later work.

She first exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in London in 1876, and in 1877 was among the few women invited to show in the inaugural exhibition of the Grosvenor Gallery, the venue that helped define the Aesthetic movement. She later married the ceramicist and novelist William De Morgan; the couple shared an interest in spiritualism that runs through much of her imagery of souls, angels, and the passage between life and death. During the First World War she turned her painting to direct social purpose, addressing the war and the sinking of civilian ships, and in 1916 held a benefit exhibition of this work at her studio on Edith Grove in London in support of the Red Cross and the Italian Croce Rossa.

Evelyn De Morgan died in London on 2 May 1919 and was buried with her husband at Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey. Her sister later established the De Morgan Foundation to preserve the bulk of her estate, which today holds 56 of her oil paintings along with a large body of drawings and sketches.

De Morgan's contemporaries recognized her talent early: she won the Slade Scholarship in her first year of study and was among the few women asked to exhibit at the landmark 1877 opening of the Grosvenor Gallery, the show that helped define late Victorian Aestheticism. Twentieth-century taste largely set her aside along with much other Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist painting, and her reputation survived mainly through the De Morgan Foundation's stewardship of her estate. That has changed with a wave of scholarly and museum reappraisal, most visibly the traveling retrospective A Marriage of Arts and Crafts: Evelyn and William De Morgan, which moved from its United States debut at the Delaware Art Museum in 2023 to the Crocker Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg, through 2024, and drew renewed attention from the art press. Current museum interest tends to frame her within two overlapping stories: as a rare woman admitted to elite Victorian art training, and as a painter whose spiritualist, allegorical subject matter anticipated later feminist and social readings of her work.

Evelyn De Morgan's works are rare at auction, since most of her output was retained by her family and now sits with the De Morgan Foundation rather than circulating through the trade. Her confirmed auction record is Crown of Glory, sold at Sotheby's London for GBP 143,000 (about USD 224,067) on 21 November 1989, well above its GBP 40,000 to 60,000 estimate. No later public sale has been confirmed to surpass that figure, though complete price data for every lot sold since is not fully public. Because so few of her major paintings come to market, individual auction results should be read as isolated data points rather than as a smooth pricing trend.

Because so much of Evelyn De Morgan's output remains with the De Morgan Foundation, the population of her paintings available to the private market is small, and that scarcity is itself a driver of price when a significant work does appear. There is no published catalogue raisonne, so provenance research typically runs through the De Morgan Foundation's own records rather than an independent scholarly catalogue. Collectors should also expect wide variation between a documented, exhibited major painting and a smaller study or drawing, since her market is concentrated in a handful of large, iconographically rich figure paintings rather than a broad body of comparable works.