Sea Changes

Evelyn's diary and juvenilia reveal her avid interest in ‘seriously reading’ (E. De Morgan 1872: 19 August). Throughout her painting career she drew upon a remarkable variety of literary sources and subjects for inspiration: from the ninth century bc to the early twentieth century, including classical, biblical, Latin and European texts; there seem to be ‘relatively few [paintings] that did not have some literary reference’ (Yates 1996: 59). A striking number of Evelyn's paintings depict literary materials such as books or scrolls of poetry or prose, and several depict them in conjunction with women. This chapter investigates how her readings inspired and influenced her artworks. It focuses on Evelyn's series of oil paintings The Little Sea Maid (1880–8) (Fig. 7.1), The Sea Maidens (1885–6) (Fig. 7.2) and Daughters of the Mist (1900–9) (Fig. 7.3), based on Hans Christian Andersen's popular tale The Little Mermaid (1836–7), and shows how she ‘seizes the narrative’ as a suffragist (Mancoff 2012: 85). Evelyn wrote her own fairy tales, and her paintings use narrative devices, showing female figures in defining moments of conflict or metamorphosis. Her art illustrates how ‘a new twist on an old tale can be an act of transgression, as well as one of transformation’ (Mancoff 2012: 85), giving a voice to the voiceless.

In Andersen's fairy tale noir, with which Evelyn's male and female contemporaries would have been familiar, the Sea King's daughter longs to explore beyond her underwater domain and sells her voice to a sea-witch in exchange for legs in order to become human, hopefully marry the prince and thus gain an immortal soul. Andersen visited England in 1847 and 1857, when translations of his works were already being made, and it is likely that the story's first translation into English in 1872 – when Evelyn was a teenager, undergoing her own transition into womanhood, and acutely aware of her own domestic captivity – inspired the idea for her understudied yet fascinating trilogy. Andersen also contributed to Good Words for the Young (1868), for which Mary Watts produced illustrations.