The overlooked masterpiece full of coded messages about World War One

Summary

The overlooked masterpiece full of coded messages about World War OneTrustees of the De Morgan Foundation(Credit: Trustees of the De Morgan Foundation)Esoteric and pioneering, the paintings of a lesser-known Pre-Raphaelite, Evelyn De Morgan, explored the trauma and meaning of war – and prefigured current fantasy art.On a rocky beach that glows red with lava, smoke-breathing dragons surround wretched-looking prisoners beseeching an angel to deliver them from suffering. The oil painting Death of the Dragon by Evelyn De Morgan looks at first like a scene from the New Testament's apocalyptic Book of Revelation. But, painted between 1914 and 1918, it's also something more personal and critical: an allegory for the misery and bondage of World War One, and the confrontation between good and evil.Trustees of the De Morgan FoundationEvelyn De Morgan's apocalyptic Death of the Dragon (1914-18) is an allegory about World War One (Credit: Trustees of the De Morgan Foundation)The show coincides with the reopening of the De Morgan Museum in Barnsley, Yorkshire, following an extensive roof renovation, and responds to a rising interest in this lesser-known artist. She has tended to be eclipsed by her husband William – a ceramicist and writer, who had worked early in his career with the textile designer William Morris – and the famous men in their circle: her uncle and art teacher, John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, for example, and the painters William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Much of what we know about De Morgan today comes from her sister Wilhelmina, who set up the De Morgan Foundation, but even she saw fit to publish the couple's posthumous biography under the title William De Morgan and his Wife.[The paintings] convey the collective trauma of living through a World War that claimed close to a million British livesYet, Evelyn De Morgan more than deserves the art world's belated acclaim. A Slade graduate, who was working at the tail end of the Pre-Raphaelite movement, s...