“De Morgan was a spiritualist, meaning she believed that after the death of an individual’s body, their soul or spirit continued to live and operate in the world, and that individuals beyond the grave could thus be contacted. Such…ideas dominate her mature oeuvre.”
-Emma Merkling
In an article published in the New York Tribune about a century ago, one reviewer compared the ethereality of Nicholas Roerich’s art to dreams and fantasies. Speaking specifically about Roerich’s December 1920 exhibition, the writer commented: “The strangeness of fairyland descends upon the beholder and yet he feels that fairyland has become true.”
These words could also be used to describe the soul-elevating work of the Pre-Raphaelite-era artist Evelyn De Morgan. Her paintings, like the fay Lady of the Lake, seem to reach out and grab the viewer by the hand, leading him away to deep and imponderable domains as-yet-unknown to science. There is a serene and yet magnetising sublimity to De Morgan’s art; there are layers, dimensions, passageways of colour, light, and passion that appear to hint at eternity and its invisible–or finer–forces.
According to Emma Merkling, a PhD candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, these characteristics, which pervade many of De Morgan’s paintings, are intimately connected to De Morgan’s esoteric and spiritual interests. De Morgan, Merkling told The Thinker’s Garden, was working within an artistic framework to grapple with the “thornier or more esoteric epistemological problems posed to her by her spirit guides”. These issues, Merkling said, included “the representation of that which is essentially unrepresentable, the limits of human knowledge, and the question of the nature of ultimate reality itself”.
Merkling is investigating these elements in a doctoral dissertation, “Imponderable: Physics, Mathematics, and Spirit in Evelyn De Morgan’s Art and Automatic Writings, 1883–1919.” We spoke with them to learn more about De Morgan’s beliefs, artistry, and reception.
The Custodian: When did you first take an interest in Evelyn De Morgan?
Emma Merkling: I first heard of Evelyn De Morgan in 2016, on a visit to Guildhall Art Gallery. I had just moved to the U.K. for my master’s degree and our supervisor had brought us to see the exhibition “Victorians Decoded: Art and Telegraphy”. I remember rounding a corner and stopping short in front of Moonbeams Dipping into the Sea (c. 1905–10)—it was utterly arresting and otherworldly and in the dim exhibition space seemed almost to glow. Until relatively recently, De Morgan’s paintings were rarely displayed in major collections, so I had never seen one before. I was struck by how unlike the other works in that room it was; how strange and out of place it seemed among Leightons and Poynters.
We had to present, off-the-cuff, on any work in the exhibition; I chose Moonbeams and talked (anachronistically) about WiFi and cloud storage— for me it evoked something of the technology of transmission, an electrified space full of dispersed, invisible data being downloaded into embodiment. I have always been interested in the intersections between history of art and history of science and so a year later when I started thinking about PhD topics in that vein, I kept returning to my memory of that first encounter with the painting. By that point I had become familiar enough with Victorian energy physics to know that the junctions between De Morgan’s art and the visual language of nineteenth-century science, especially the science of energic transmission, storage, and exchange, were worth exploring. I was also curious about that strangeness of her works—their peculiar and particular visual language—which had originally struck me, as well as their occult context.
De Morgan was a spiritualist, meaning she believed that after the death of an individual’s body, their soul or spirit continued to live and operate in the world, and that individuals beyond the grave could thus be contacted. Such spiritualist ideas dominate her mature oeuvre, which includes works like the ethereal Moonbeams. Ultimately it was this, combined with the fact that De Morgan has been little studied as an artist—only one book and one catalogue dedicated to her work have been published—that motivated me to write a doctoral dissertation on her art.
C: Could you tell us more about the discovery you made in one of her sketchbooks? What does it tell us about her interests at the time?
EM: Early in 2019, on a routine archival visit to Wightwick Manor in Wolverhampton—which holds a few De Morgan paintings and resources—I was leafing through a sketchbook of hers I’d not yet seen before when I noticed, towards the back, a few pages of what seemed like fragmentary notes scribbled in pencil in her handwriting. My interest was immediately piqued, but it wasn’t until later, poring more closely over the photos I’d taken, that I realised what I’d found—a list of book titles, mostly published only a few years before the date of the notebook itself (c. 1877), and many of them scientific texts.
The discovery was exciting for two main reasons. Firstly, very few written sources in De Morgan’s hand have survived: besides juvenilia, only a few (fragmentary) letters and her anonymously published book of communications with spirits (The Result of an Experiment, 1909) are known. That has made it difficult, among other things, to say with any certainty what De Morgan’s intellectual interests might have been—previous scholarship has always been reliant on a broader net of resources through which to approach her art, like popular publications and the interests of her social circle. This list of book titles represents the first primary evidence, in her own hand, of specific intellectual resources with which De Morgan was familiar. Secondly, the discovery was exciting for me personally because the presence of many scientific titles in the list supports a central premise of my dissertation: that De Morgan was keenly interested in the imagery, language, and methodologies of science and its philosophy, from physics and the Baconian method to physiological psychology and symbolic logic.
More broadly, the titles reveal an excitingly varied range of interests from early in De Morgan’s career—there are references to contemporary poetry, publications on cultural history (theatre, art, and music), and works of cultural criticism and socio-political commentary. Though the list itself does not, of course, definitely prove anything, its range of references will no doubt serve as a useful, concrete resource for future scholars looking for an intellectual entry point into her art and the contexts that informed it.
C: How much do we know about De Morgan’s paranormal experiences?
EM: Not as much as we’d like—but more than we know about other aspects of her interests! She seems to have been introduced to spiritualism in the mid 1880s when she met her husband William, whose mother was the famous spiritualist medium Sophia De Morgan. From this point onwards we see an almost total shift in her artistic focus: the vast majority of her paintings from this point onwards contain spiritualist content. Because of the lack of sources in De Morgan’s own hand, the only concrete evidence we have of her paranormal experiences comes from the book of communications with spirit beings she and her husband published in 1909 with the (rather scientific) title The Result of an Experiment. (Though they published it anonymously, their authorship was later confirmed in publication by De Morgan’s sister and biographer, A. M. W. Stirling.)
We know from Stirling and from the book’s introduction that every evening from their marriage in 1885 on, the De Morgans would sit down together to practice automatic writing, the means through which they communicated with spirits. One would put their hand on the other’s, and they would wait for the spirits to write “through” them. These messages were then assembled and sorted by the De Morgans and published. Information in The Result of an Experiment suggests that automatic writing was the De Morgans’ primary and perhaps only significant paranormal experience— their spirit guides disparaged séances and other such materialisation-based occult encounters, referring to these as trickery. There’s plenty of fascinating material in the text outlining the sorts of interactions the De Morgans had with the spirit guides who wrote through them, including beneficent angels with names like “Pharaoh” and “the Leper Angel”, famous artists like Fra Angelico, and trickster spirits sending messages intended to confuse them.
C: Could you explain the concept of the “imponderable ether”? Is it related at all to the occult idea of the astral fluid? How can we see “the etheric” in her paintings?
EM: The “imponderable ether” was the invisible and undetectable medium understood by Victorian physics (to greater or lesser degrees) to penetrate and fill all space and to conduct radiant energy, facilitating the transmission of lightwaves, heatwaves, and electromagnetic impulses, among other things. Physicists quibbled about its specific properties but broadly speaking understood it to connect all bodies down to even atoms themselves.
Because it was undetectable, it was notoriously elusive, and despite its existence being effectively disproved by the Michelson–Morley experiment of 1887 it remained a compelling framework for many scientists, especially theologically inclined ones, well into the twentieth century. As a medium connecting the material and immaterial orders, it was also appealing to spiritualists, who understood it to provide a physical bridge between matter and spirit, placing disparate bodies in contact and facilitating energetic interchanges between them—including, they argued, communication with disembodied spirits.
From the 1870s, when De Morgan was just beginning her artistic career, right through until her death in 1919, popular books were published— including by practicing physicists—arguing for ether as the eternal and enduring location for spirit. For example, the physicist Oliver Lodge explicitly argued that the seat of human personality was an “ether body”—composed of and embedded in the ether—which existed independent from, but was capable of acting upon, an individual’s corporeal body, and which survived eternally after the corporeal body’s death.
In this sense, yes, it has some commonalities with occult notions of astral fluid; certainly it shares common ground with Theosophist ideas about the astral body—and physicists like Lodge were publishing their ideas about ether bodies around the same time as Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater were outlining their ideas about the astral plane and the various non-corporeal bodies of man. However, evidence from The Result of an Experiment suggests that De Morgan’s conception of a non-corporeal spirit body has more in common with Lodge’s spiritualistic ether body than Theosophist ideas about the astral body.
We can see etheric qualities in a number of De Morgan’s works which I refer to as her “Symbolist” paintings—Moonbeams being among them. These paintings provide an ingenious response to the fundamental challenge of representing, in visual art, spirit—which, like the ether, is fundamentally invisible.
In Moonbeams, we see a beam of light rendered visible, embodied, by three allegorical bodies, together forming a single soul. Like ether, they connect the heavens (spirit) and the earth (matter), mediating between them and literalising, through this interlinkage, the spiritualist idea of a connection between the spiritual and material realms. Like ether and light, and indeed spirits, they occupy an unstable materiality between substantive and insubstantial: there is a sense that their visibility is transient; that like rays of light they might shimmer back into invisibility at any moment.
The way they connect heavens and earth also evokes the communication which spiritualists believed to be possible between these realms: their bodies form a sort of chain or circuit mediating between the energy source of the moon above and the conductive saltwater of the earthly realm below, almost like a telegraphic cable conveying energy or information between the two realms; and this energy is then dispersed or spread across the whole surface of the painting—through light rippling across the water; through the wispy illuminated, pastel clouds.
This dispersal across the picture plane in various forms of what is really one substance—light—is a signally etheric quality. There’s also something etheric in how supposedly empty space in this picture is given a certain palpability or substance, not just through the bodies but also through the fluffy textured brushwork with which De Morgan paints the otherwise flat blue tone of the sky. The whole surface of the work is rendered capable of conducting energy, information, light—or spirit.
C: How do your research findings on De Morgan challenge the way she’s historically been received or understood as an artist?
EM: De Morgan has long suffered from an unflattering reputation— attributable at least in part to sexism, though for many years (especially in the modernist generation of Roger Fry and Clive Bell) the same could also be said for her now more celebrated male Victorian contemporaries like Edward Burne-Jones and G. F. Watts.
Especially in her mature career, her works’ mystical content and mannered, Pre-Raphaelitesque style were derided as regressive, disconnected from the modern world, derivative of male contemporaries like Edward Burne-Jones, and insufficiently intellectually or politically engaged with the key issues of her time. Recent research (including my own) has thankfully begun to redress this, among other things demonstrating her intense engagement with a broad range of contemporary intellectual resources and contexts—including the science of her time.
My close analysis of The Result of an Experiment in relation to her artworks and some of the texts in that list of book titles reveals, I believe, that De Morgan was working within a consistent and intellectually rigorous artistic framework to grapple with the thornier or more esoteric epistemological problems posed to her by her spirit guides—issues no less challenging than the representation of that which is essentially unrepresentable, the limits of human knowledge, and the question of the nature of ultimate reality itself. I think my findings also foreground how wonderfully creative, shrewd, and occasionally even avant-garde she was in her particular visual expression of this content.
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