Victorian Art

Evelyn de Morgan Study of a Standing Female Nude 1855 - 1917 Black chalk and pastel on grey paper Image size: 12 ½ x 19 inches (48.2 x 31.7 cm) Pre-Raphaelite style frame Provenance J.S. Mass & Co., Ltd., London, J.X. Reynolds & Co., Ltd. Once she had graduated from the Slade School of Art, Evelyn continued to draw every day for the rest of her life. Her drawings are enlightening not only for their skill and subject matter, but also for their ability to teach us her working process. From loose compositional sketches, Evelyn swiftly progressed to detailed life studies for the figures in her paintings. Choosing to draw mainly on a grey wove paper in pencil and pastel, Evelyn produced hundreds of figure studies. Her rigorously-examined double studies of clothed and nude figures are particularly fascinating and underline the artist’s obsession with the human form and her desire for accuracy. A deep understanding of anatomy is obvious in this drawing and looking at the work you feel as though you can reach out and feel the muscle and bone under the skin, that you could feel the pulse of life through the soft skin. Evelyn de Morgan Born into a landowning family, from an early age Evelyn De Morgan, née Pickering, demonstrated a precocious artistic talent and a passionate desire to pursue a career as an artist, writing in her diary on her seventeenth birthday ‘Art is eternal, life is short… I have not a moment to lose’ (Evelyn De Morgan’s Diary, 30 August 1872, De Morgan Foundation Archive). Her maternal uncle, the artist John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope encouraged her talents and accompanied her on her first formative journeys to Italy where she discovered the Renaissance masters, particularly Botticelli. Overcoming initial parental opposition, Evelyn enrolled at the newly formed Slade School in 1873, one of the first women to do so. The Slade revolutionised women’s artistic education by allowing female students to study the nude from life alongside their male counterparts. Whilst at the Slade she began to submit work under her middle name Evelyn, rather than her Christian name Mary, as its gender ambiguity offered a chance for her work to be judged on its own merit. One of her tutors, Edward Poynter...

A late 19th century British Society portrait oil painting of a beautiful young debutante by Victorian artist Annie Louisa Swynnerton which is signed and dated 1893. It has been sugge...

Watercolour on paper Image size: 4 1/2 x 3 1/2 inches (11.5 x 9 cm) Mounted and framed This is an arresting image featuring a head and shoulders portrait of a bearded man wearing a ...

Graphite on buff paper 'Hales Abbey, Gloucestershire' initialled, inscribed and dated 1837 bottom left Image size: 8 x 13 1/2 inches (20 x 34.5 cm) 18th Century Hogarth frame and was...