Evelyn de Morgan

General Sir Edward Earle Gascoigne Bulwer; thence by descent to the present owners

Catherine Gordon (ed.), Evelyn de Morgan - Oil Paintings, 1996, no. 17, pp. 16, 28 (untraced)

London, The Grosvenor Gallery, 1881, no. 156

This powerfully direct portrait of Winifred, eight-year-old daughter of General Sir Edward Earle Gascoigne Bulwer, was painted as the young Evelyn Pickering struck out for independence. Apparently against much opposition from her parents, she became one of the most innovative painters of her generation. However it had not been a clear path to success; her drawing master was secretly told to tell her that she had no artistic talent and her mother is said to have exclaimed ‘I want a daughter – not an artist!’ In her biography of her sister Evelyn, Mrs Stirling gives the following reason for their mother’s opposition; ‘Not unnaturally she wanted a girl to be a companion and a pride to her, one who would fulfil the accepted role of the young woman of her day. Well-educated, well-read and well-bred, she would, in due course, ‘come out’ in the usual fashion; she would take part in innocent pleasures in really good society; eventually she would marry satisfactorily to become a model wife and mother, and finally go down to the grave, beloved, revered – and quickly forgotten. This was the destiny mapped out for Evelyn.’ (A.M.W. Stirling, William de Morgan and His Wife, 1922, pp. 174-175)

Fortunately Evelyn went against her parent’s wishes and after studying art at the Slade and undertaking an independent course of study in Italy, in the 1870s Evelyn made her first appearances in exhibitions, showing St Catherine of Alexandria at the Dudley Gallery in 1875 (destroyed by fire in 1991) and Cadmus and Harmonia (de Morgan Foundation collection). As part of the new wave of Pre-Raphaelite painters that emerged at this time, she was among those who exhibited at the revolutionary Grosvenor Gallery in its inaugural exhibition in 1877. Her exhibit was Ariadne in Naxos, one of her most beautiful pictures, which it was claimed by her early biographer had been painted in secret; ‘The artist had been forbidden to paint and worked at this picture in secret in her bed-room at her home No.6 Upper Grosvenor Street, every afternoon when her mother was out driving.’ Evelyn was not easy to live with and after her father’s death in 1877 her sister recalled a period in which the Pickering siblings lived with their mother in a state of almost constant tension, each keeping to their own part of the house and the two brothers rarely speaking a word to anyone; ‘As for Evelyn she was the most trying inmate, all fizz and excitement from morning till night, mamma and I used to be positively thankful when we heard the door bang and knew she had left the house, and we might reasonably expect peace and quiet for half an hour. One never quite knew with her what was coming next. I used to say it was like having a perpetual thunderstorm in the house.’

It seems that if her mother did oppose Evelyn’s choice of profession as vehemently as Mrs Stirling claimed, she relented, as Venus and Cupid appeared at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1878 and Night and Sleep in 1879 (both in the de Morgan Foundation collection). In 1880 Evelyn was unmarried and living as a professional artist. She took her first studio at Trafalgar Studios on Manresa Road in Chelsea the same year that the present portrait was painted.

In 1880 Evelyn also exhibited a circular Portrait of Marjorie Mure (present whereabouts unknown) and in 1883, following her marriage to the designer William de Morgan, she exhibited Portrait of Mrs Donaldson Rawlins at the Grosvenor Gallery (Christie’s, London, 11 November 1999, lot 22). In 1884 she painted a pair of portraits of her cousins Alice Mildred and Winifred Julia Spencer Stanhope (Christie’s, London, 11 July 2018, lot 103). Winifred Bulwer, Marjorie Mure, Alice Mildred and Winifred Julia Spencer Stanhope were all cousins of Evelyn which explains why the portraits were commissioned.