Yesterday we were talking about the Netflix series Kaos, and the mythical figure of Cassandra.
We included a painting of Cassandra by English Symbolism painter Evelyn De Morgan.
Evelyn De Morgan (30 August 1855 – 2 May 1919) 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.
De Morgan and her husband were both spiritualists, and De Morgan’s sister and biographer A. M. W. Stirling credits them as the anonymous authors of a 1909 publication of automatic writings — communications with spirit beings — titled The Result of an Experiment. The introduction to this book describes the couple as practicing automatic writing together every night for many years of their marriage.
Evelyn De Morgan died on 2 May 1919 in London, two years after the death of her husband and was buried in Brookwood Cemetery near Woking, Surrey. Their tombstone bears an inscription from The Result of an Experiment: “Sorrow is only of the flesh / The life of the spirit is joy”.
Hope in a Prison of Despair, 1887 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hope_in_a_Prison_of_Despair.jpg Allegorical, pre-raphaelite painting showing Hope as a woman or very young man holding a lamp, entering the dungeon where Despair is shown as another human figure bowed down with grief. Hope’s saint-like halo suggests the comfort brought by religious faith.Our Lady of Peace, 1907 (oil on canvas)Queen Eleanor and Fair RosamundNight and Sleep (1878) In the painting dark-haired Night guides her son Sleep. His relaxed pose is set against the “more energetic line of his mother’s body.” Art historian Elise Lawton Smith notes that the couple’s “horizontality suggests both sleep and lateral movement as they pass across the landscape”. Poppies, symbolic of sleep, peace, death and the artist’s pacifism, are listlessly strewn by the somnolent Sleep as he passes. – Wikipedia
Symbolism
Evelyn De Morgan’s paintings have been described as an example of the late 19th century art movement called Symbolism.
Symbolism was a late 19th-century art movement of French and Belgian origin in poetry and other arts seeking to represent absolute truths symbolically through language and metaphorical images, mainly as a reaction against naturalism and realism.
Death and the Grave Digger (La Mort et le Fossoyeur) (c. 1895) by Carlos Schwabe is a visual compendium of symbolist motifs. The angel of Death, pristine snow, and the dramatic poses of the characters all express symbolist longings for transfiguration “anywhere, out of the world”.Art (Caress of the Sphinx) (1896), by Fernand Khnopff, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, BrusselsIsle of the Dead (1880), by Arnold Böcklin, Kunstmuseum, BaselAngels in the Night (1891), by William Degouve de Nuncques, Kröller-Müller Museum, OtterloThe Nightmare (1781), by Johann Heinrich Füssli, Detroit Institute of Arts, DetroitWikipedia
Hugo Simberg
A disciple of Gallen-Kallela was Hugo Simberg, who was also influenced by Böcklin and Burne-Jones. His work, populated by strange animals and evil spirits, focuses on death, which he often depicts performing everyday tasks such as tending a garden (The Garden of Death, 1896, Ateneumin Taidemuseum, Helsinki). – Wikipedia
The Wounded Angel, 1903 voted Finland’s “national painting” in a public vote organized by Ateneum in 2006The Garden of Death Like many of Simberg’s paintings, depicts a gloomy, otherworldly scene. The central figures are reminiscent of the classic black-clad Grim Reaper, but paradoxically are tending to gardens, traditionally symbols of birth or renewal. – Wikipedia The Poor Devil with its Twins, 1898, watercolor and oil The Farmer’s Wife and the Poor Devil with its Twins, 1899
Personifications of Death
Many painters of the Symbolism movement personified death in various ways.
Personifications of death are found in many religions and mythologies. In some mythologies, a character known as the Grim Reaper (usually depicted as a berobed skeleton wielding a scythe) causes the victim’s death by coming to collect that person’s soul. Other beliefs hold that the spectre of death is only a psychopomp, a benevolent figure who serves to gently sever the last ties between the soul and the body, and to guide the deceased to the afterlife, without having any control over when or how the victim dies.
Jānis Rosenthāls, Latvia’s most popular artist, depicts a meeting with Death that is everyday but inevitable: the mother of a dead child looks at a woman in a white frown (it seems that she is in the first stages of accepting death – it’s denial and anger), but seems ready to open her fingers and give up the baby. The child is no longer with her, not in the world of the living – he too is wearing white robes symbolizing death. Skinny woman with a sickle, though depicted leaning over the child, makes the impression of a very high: if she straightens – will not fit on the canvas, as do not fit in the picture in the whole height of the tree: death is certainly terrible, especially when it is for his victim prematurely, but still it is an integral part of nature, like the forest from which Death came out, into which she will take the baby and which is her size.
Psychopomps (from the Greek word ψυχοπομπός, psychopompós, literally meaning the ‘guide of souls’) are creatures, spirits, angels, demons, or deities in many religions whose responsibility is to escort newly deceased souls from Earth to the afterlife.
Their role is not to judge the deceased, but simply to guide them.
Psychology In Jungian psychology, the psychopomp is a mediator between the unconscious and conscious realms. It is symbolically personified in dreams as a wise man or woman, or sometimes as a helpful beast.
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