Evelyn De Morgan
(1855 - 1919)
 

Evelyn De Morgan  was an English painter associated early in her career with the later phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Movement, and working in a range of styles including Aestheticism and Symbolism. Her paintings are figural, foregrounding the female body through the use of spiritual, mythological, and allegorical themes. They rely on a range of metaphors (such as light and darkness, transformation, and bondage) to express what several scholars have identified as spiritualist and feminist content. Her later works also dealt with the themes of war from a pacifist perspective, engaging with conflicts such as the Second Boer War and World War I.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evelyn_De_Morgan

Night and Sleep
1878
Oil on canvas
42 x 62 cm.
De Morgan Centre, Cannon Hall, Cawthorne, UK
https://www.demorgan.org.uk/collection/night-and-sleep/

One of the first ever female pupils at London's Slade School, she has littered this work with hidden feminist symbolism. Whilst the scene depicts the arrival of sleep it can also be interpreted as "entering an new dawn, where the figure will awake to a world of equal gender rights, ready, like de Morgan, to make their mark.