Where: Guildhall, City of London | MAP

4th April 2025 – 4th January 2026

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Evelyn De Morgan (1855 – 1919) was a painter who defied the expectations of her class and gender to become one of the most impressive artists of a generation. Her richly coloured canvases featuring beautifully draped figures, deliver messages of feminism, spirituality and the rejection of war and material wealth, making them incredibly relevant today.

Evelyn’s allegiance to popular styles ensured her pictures were fashionable – Ariadne at Naxos (1877) sold immediately to Rt. Hon. John Mundella from the Grosvenor exhibit – but she cared very little for the values of movements whose aesthetic qualities she borrowed, instead seeking to use her canvases to present her own socio-political concerns to a wider public and act as a catalyst for change. In her early pictures, this is more subtle in order that her pictures could be recognised as Aesthetic. Certainly, with its desolate, dreamlike beach, richly draped female gazing away from view and limited palette, Ariadne is – stylistically – an Aesthetic work of art. However, the title of the work gives the picture narrative, which was against the Aesthetic code. Ariadne is depicted alone and abandoned on the island of Naxos, a point in Greek myth when she has been left by her lover Theseus, who is traditionally painted sailing off into the distance when artists tackle this theme. Evelyn has instead put the female character at the centre of the canvas and dressed her in the red robes of Christian martyrs, successfully yet subtly imbuing the painting with a subtext about female suffering and abandonment by the patriarchal society she lived in.