Great Artists - Evelyn De Morgan



Make Your Lives Beautiful

  • William and Evelyn De Morgan (1909)

Over the weekend I found myself at the London Guildhall Art Gallery1, a small but quiet gallery in central London, UK. Like a lot of museums and galleries in the UK, it’s free to enter.

They have a few famous works there, including a famous piece by Rosetti2 and a grand piece called “The Defeat of the Floating batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782” by John Singleton Copley3, but without realising until arriving there, they had an exhibition on Evelyn De Morgan.

It was your typical exhibition, with various artworks by Evelyn De Morgan, and displays and posters giving some history and context to her work, telling her biography as you moved through the gallery.

I’m not going to go into detail of her biography or life, I would just be copy and pasting text from the Evelyn De Morgan Wikipedia page, or the De Morgan Collection website.

But one thing that struck as I was enjoying her artworks in the gallery, was the following quote, which she wrote in her diary when she was just 17:

At work a little after 7, 17 today, that is to say seventeen years wasted in eating, dawdling and frittering time away. Art is eternal, but life is short… I will make up for it now, I have not a moment to lose.

Art is eternal, but life is short… what a fantastic quote.

The De Morgan Collection website gives a fantastic insight into her work ethic:

Once she had graduated from the Slade School of Art, Evelyn continued to draw every day for the rest of her life.4

This goes to an important idea about Growth and Fixed Mindset. From that quote and reading a bit about her approach to her art, it’s easy to see that Evelyn had a growth mindset, was continuously practising and thinking about how to improve what she was doing.

Key Ideas

The three key ideas we can take from Evelyn De Morgan’s approach to art are:

  1. Practice every day
  2. Have a reverence for your craft
  3. Appreciate beauty

I hope this article was able to firstly introduce you to some art you might not have otherwise enjoyed, but also served as some emotional fuel for your soul.

One of the ‘secrets’ to improving at guitar? Just keep going, make your life beautiful.

  1. London Guildhall Art Gallery ↩︎

  2. La ghirlandata by Rossetti ↩︎

  3. The Defeat of the Floating batteries at Gibraltar, September 1782 by John Singleton Copley ↩︎

  4. De Morgan Collection ↩︎