"In The Shadow Of Dragons: A Prayer For Salvation"

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.

The spectacular painting, measuring more than a metre high, is one of the highlights of a new exhibition, Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London, at London's Guildhall Art Gallery, home to the City of London Corporation's art collection. On display are rarely seen works from the De Morgan Foundation, as well as two newly-restored paintings and two recreations, completed just last year, of works lost in an art warehouse fire in 1991. 

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.

Yet, 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, she took the arguably twee or overly sentimental genre into new territory, creating tableaux that were unusually visionary and energetic. The women she portrayed were less passive than those depicted by her contemporaries, and featured as symbols of agency rather than objects of the male gaze. Instead of a drowned body floating down the river, as in Sir John Everett Millais' Ophelia, or figures whose main currency was their looks, we meet a skilled sorceress creating magical potions and flying superheroines who can cast rain, thunder and lightning from their fingers.

These goddess-like figures show the influence of the classical art that De Morgan had studied. Immaculately executed works such as Boreas and Oreithyia (1896) reveal her interest in mythology and her mastery of the human form, reminiscent of Michelangelo.

In Death of the Dragon, in terms of composition, it's easy to see the influence of Sandro Botticelli's The Birth of Venus (1483–1485), which De Morgan had visited in Florence. If De Morgan's haloed angel echoes this idea of rebirth − reflecting the artist's belief in a spiritual afterlife − then the winged beasts are its counterpart, Death, always biting at the heels of the people and threatening to overcome them. Elsewhere in her work, Death takes alternative forms: a dark angel bearing a scythe, sea monsters or – more obliquely – a sand timer. It's a symbolism that speaks to life's transience, and acquires additional poignancy in her later work, conveying the collective trauma of living through a World War that claimed close to a million British lives.

- Author: Deborah Nicholls-Lee, BBC