The Vision 1914

Evelyn De Morgan paints an uncanny vision of a sunset on the sea. I can imagine her wrestling with her canvas in the gloom of her studio, trying to figure out a color that would capture that fiery orb. You can almost see her mixing those mauves and blues and pinks to make the sky. The whole scene is like a strange dream, or a memory. It's interesting how she uses the two women, the red head and the brunette, like an allegory of virtue and vice, and the winged devil emerging from the cliffs. I bet she was thinking of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, those other pre-Raphaelite painters who also had this strange interest in dreams and myths. They were all trying to capture something otherworldly, and I love how it looks so contemporary now. It makes me wonder what they might have been thinking, what they might have been trying to tell us.