De Morgan Centre, London
Caroline Worthington welcomes the reopening of a museum dedicated to William and Evelyn De Morgan but wishes it had told her more about these important Victorian artists
Wilhelmina Stirling was 90-something when she and her manservant, Mr Peters, showed the BBC around her Wandsworth home in a 1961 documentary directed by Ken Russell. Narrator Huw Wheldon described how Old Battersea House was “a museum of pre-Raphaelite art so extensive that a tour typically takes five hours”.
Peters would illuminate the house’s darker corners with a lamp. Today, there is no need for a torch to admire the paintings and ceramics that Stirling bequeathed to the De Morgan Foundation shortly before her death in 1965.
About 250 items from the 1,000 ceramics, 500 works on paper and 60 paintings by William and Evelyn De Morgan in the collection are now back on show in the De Morgan Centre, which reopened in September after a two-year closure.
The venue in Wandsworth, south London, was forced to shut in 2009 when threatened with the termination of its lease. But it was given a three-year reprieve following the decision by philanthropists Dorothy and Michael Hintze to rescue the Wandsworth Museum (reviewed in Museums Journal December 2010, p52), which shares the former library with the centre.
Determination In the BBC film, which sadly is not available to watch in the centre, Stirling recalls how her older sister, Evelyn, was banned as a child from painting. Determined to be an artist, Evelyn puttied around the cracks of the nursery door so that the smell of oil paints would not escape.
“I want a daughter, not at artist,” her mother despaired. Evelyn was 17 years old when she became the first woman to attend the Slade School of Art in London.
With the support of her uncle, the pre-Raphaelite artist John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope, she was soon exhibiting at the Grosvenor Gallery alongside the likes of Edward Burne-Jones, GF Watts and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Her work became popular among the nouveau-riche merchants and industrialists of late Victorian Britain, including Annie and Merton Russell-Cotes, who acquired a painting for their new home in Bournemouth, which is now a museum.
William De Morgan’s hand-painted tiles were also popular, decorating fireplaces or framed and hung on the walls.
Shared interests
The artistic couple met in the mid-1880s and married in 1887, coincidentally the year the library in Wandsworth opened. Besides arts and crafts, they shared an interest in spiritualism and social reform. Both were involved in the woman’s suffrage movement.
As well as at the De Morgan Centre, William’s work can be admired in the Arab Hall in Leighton House in Kensington. This was built by the artist Frederic, Lord Leighton, and is now a museum.
The Leighton House commission allowed De Morgan to experiment with the almost lost art of lustre decoration, which became the hallmark of his work.
In 2006 the centre acquired, with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Galleon Tile Panel. This was made at his pottery in Sands End, Chelsea, possibly for an American patron to a design originally created for P&O.
William De Morgan was a published novelist, designed a gear for bicycles, and wrote to the Admiralty during the first world war with an idea for how the navy might destroy U-boats.
Evelyn De Morgan created a 1916 work in aid of the Red Cross, in which a solitary female stands on a rocky outcrop in the ocean surrounded by winged and sharp-toothed beasts, which is typical of her symbolist art.
Because these are two artists whose character and ideas are as colourful as their art, not to mention Wilhelmina Stirling, their biographer, it is a shame that the level of interpretation in the De Morgan Centre is so low-key.
Text panels behind the reception desk merely introduce the couple and a handheld guide is offered to help you explore the paintings. The showcases are full of William De Morgan’s ceramics but lack any labels. Is open storage the best strategy when there is so much narrative detail to explore?
The museum requires visitors to do a lot of their own research. While the overall look of the main gallery is much as returning visitors will remember it before the centre’s closure, there is a new, small temporary exhibition space.
The first exhibition features embroideries made by prisoners, a collaborative project with the charity Fine Cell Work. There is a nice link made with William De Morgan’s mother, a campaigner alongside prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, who introduced paid needlework into prisons.
Future shows will feature work by craftspeople working in glass, jewellery and ceramics. For all its shortcomings in conveying who the De Morgans were and why they are interesting, the return of the De Morgan Centre is welcome.
But I fear that I will not be alone in leaving the centre feeling that I scarcely know them. The centre needs to rethink how it tells the story of this fascinating couple and their work.
Caroline Worthington is the chief executive of Bexley Heritage Trust
Peters would illuminate the house’s darker corners with a lamp. Today, there is no need for a torch to admire the paintings and ceramics that Stirling bequeathed to the De Morgan Foundation shortly before her death in 1965.
About 250 items from the 1,000 ceramics, 500 works on paper and 60 paintings by William and Evelyn De Morgan in the collection are now back on show in the De Morgan Centre, which reopened in September after a two-year closure.
The venue in Wandsworth, south London, was forced to shut in 2009 when threatened with the termination of its lease. But it was given a three-year reprieve following the decision by philanthropists Dorothy and Michael Hintze to rescue the Wandsworth Museum (reviewed in Museums Journal December 2010, p52), which shares the former library with the centre.
Determination In the BBC film, which sadly is not available to watch in the centre, Stirling recalls how her older sister, Evelyn, was banned as a child from painting. Determined to be an artist, Evelyn puttied around the cracks of the nursery door so that the smell of oil paints would not escape.
“I want a daughter, not at artist,” her mother despaired. Evelyn was 17 years old when she became the first woman to attend the Slade School of Art in London.
With the support of her uncle, the pre-Raphaelite artist John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope, she was soon exhibiting at the Grosvenor Gallery alongside the likes of Edward Burne-Jones, GF Watts and Lawrence Alma-Tadema.
Her work became popular among the nouveau-riche merchants and industrialists of late Victorian Britain, including Annie and Merton Russell-Cotes, who acquired a painting for their new home in Bournemouth, which is now a museum.
William De Morgan’s hand-painted tiles were also popular, decorating fireplaces or framed and hung on the walls.
Shared interests
The artistic couple met in the mid-1880s and married in 1887, coincidentally the year the library in Wandsworth opened. Besides arts and crafts, they shared an interest in spiritualism and social reform. Both were involved in the woman’s suffrage movement.
As well as at the De Morgan Centre, William’s work can be admired in the Arab Hall in Leighton House in Kensington. This was built by the artist Frederic, Lord Leighton, and is now a museum.
The Leighton House commission allowed De Morgan to experiment with the almost lost art of lustre decoration, which became the hallmark of his work.
In 2006 the centre acquired, with the help of the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Galleon Tile Panel. This was made at his pottery in Sands End, Chelsea, possibly for an American patron to a design originally created for P&O.
William De Morgan was a published novelist, designed a gear for bicycles, and wrote to the Admiralty during the first world war with an idea for how the navy might destroy U-boats.
Evelyn De Morgan created a 1916 work in aid of the Red Cross, in which a solitary female stands on a rocky outcrop in the ocean surrounded by winged and sharp-toothed beasts, which is typical of her symbolist art.
Because these are two artists whose character and ideas are as colourful as their art, not to mention Wilhelmina Stirling, their biographer, it is a shame that the level of interpretation in the De Morgan Centre is so low-key.
Text panels behind the reception desk merely introduce the couple and a handheld guide is offered to help you explore the paintings. The showcases are full of William De Morgan’s ceramics but lack any labels. Is open storage the best strategy when there is so much narrative detail to explore?
The museum requires visitors to do a lot of their own research. While the overall look of the main gallery is much as returning visitors will remember it before the centre’s closure, there is a new, small temporary exhibition space.
The first exhibition features embroideries made by prisoners, a collaborative project with the charity Fine Cell Work. There is a nice link made with William De Morgan’s mother, a campaigner alongside prison reformer Elizabeth Fry, who introduced paid needlework into prisons.
Future shows will feature work by craftspeople working in glass, jewellery and ceramics. For all its shortcomings in conveying who the De Morgans were and why they are interesting, the return of the De Morgan Centre is welcome.
But I fear that I will not be alone in leaving the centre feeling that I scarcely know them. The centre needs to rethink how it tells the story of this fascinating couple and their work.
Caroline Worthington is the chief executive of Bexley Heritage Trust
Project data
- Cost £10,000
- Funder self-funded
- Exhibition design Michael Davies Associates