ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Science, Spiritualism, and Victorian Art: Evelyn De Morgan’s (Meta)Physics

• In Event: Science and Spiritualism: Current Perspectives and Future Directions

English Abstract

From her first contact with spirits in 1885 until her death in 1919, Evelyn De Morgan’s artistic oeuvre was dominated by Spiritualist themes, from the relationship between matter and spirit to the journey through death into immortality. Her career was dominated by one challenge: how to access the apparently immaterial world of spirit through the stubbornly material medium of art. According to her spirit guides, art was capable of this feat—but only if it worked ‘side by side’ with science. This paper focuses on paintings c.1890–1900 in which De Morgan rose to this challenge, mobilising ideas, themes, and imagery from contemporary physics to visualise her Spiritualist concerns. De Morgan came of age in an era and community in which both wide reading in the sciences and engagement with Spiritualism were the norm. Physicists and science writers in her circles, from Balfour Stewart to Frederic Myers and Oliver Lodge, grappled publicly with how spirit might be accounted for in the physical universe. The imponderable ether was posited as a plausible mechanism bridging the visible world of matter with the invisible yet physical world of spirit. This paper excavates these scientific-Spiritualist contexts to explore how De Morgan drew on theories of imponderable matter to develop a visual language in which the physical could serve as a viable route to the metaphysical. In its renegotiation of the relationship between representation and the Real, De Morgan’s art makes visible a tendency typical of, rather than idiosyncratic in, late-Victorian culture. It asks us to rethink divisions between several categories, in art and belief as well as science—material and immaterial; embodied and abstract; and real and ideal.

Author

• Emma Merkling, University of Manchester