Practice and Partnership

In a subversion of the masculinist emphasis of Wilhelmina Stirling's biography titled William De Morgan and His Wife (1922) which centres on the male figure, this chapter focuses primarily on the critically neglected female figure in this conjugal creative partnership. It aims to reveal Evelyn's progressive socio-political position as a pioneering professional woman painter, a creative partner to her husband, and an active suffragist whose work dialogised with late nineteenth and early twentieth-century feminist discourse. In its representations of powerful female figures and women embodying tensions between captivity and liberty (as well as a transformation from the former to the latter), Evelyn's art has more overt feminist elements and messages than Mary Watts’s.

Sources of information about Evelyn's life and works are extremely scarce, the most major and established being the writings of Stirling, Evelyn's sister. Yet in addition to being ‘biased, limited, and sometimes erroneous’ (E. L. Smith 2002: 17) as well as incomplete, misleading and hyperbolical according to the only two other books dedicated to Evelyn De Morgan, Evelyn De Morgan: Oil Paintings (Gordon 1996) and Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body (E. L. Smith 2002), Stirling's biography contributes to Evelyn's eclipse and effacement as an artist even as it apparently attempts to preserve her reputation. Stirling introduces Evelyn by reducing her to the nameless, contingent, secondary position of ‘Wife’ in the title, defining her in relation to the male figure as merely a marital – rather than also a creative – partner. She disguises the unconventionality of their marriage, diminishes Evelyn's role as a talented, independent artist in her own right long before her marriage to William, and only turns to a discussion of her over a hundred pages into the book to ‘measure the quality of her influence’ on her husband. While Stirling acknowledges Evelyn's significant role in William's life as ‘the most prominent factor in the moulding of his later career’ (Stirling 1922: 135), her focus on William's works and discussion of Evelyn primarily in relation to him is at the expense of an exploration of Evelyn's art in the depth it deserves.