EVELYN DE MORGAN (1855-1919)

Shown alongside The Search-light (see lot 24) in the Red Cross exhibition of 1916, The Field of the Slain is, along with The Red Cross, c. 1914-16 (The De Morgan Foundation), more overtly connected to the realities of the horror of the First World War. The desolate brown landscape is immediately comparable to the mud of the trenches and no-man’s land, and the parallels would not have been lost on a contemporary audience. In The Red Cross De Morgan filled the landscape with the wooden crosses that marked the graves of the young soldiers whose lives had been cut short in the fields of Belgium and France. However, in The Field of the Slain the slain themselves litter the ground below. These androgynous figures are clad in the robes and armour of the ancient world, rather than the uniforms of the day, thereby avoiding making too political a point and once again cementing the idea of the universality of war.

Rising above the ground is an angel gathering up the souls of the slain, represented by their heads, a number of which appear to be the faces of De Morgan’s known models. The tenderness of the angel’s expression at this solemn moment, and the peaceful countenances of the souls contrast with the distress shown in An Angel Piping to the souls in Hell, (Private Collection) which also featured in the 1916 exhibition. When The Field of the Slain last appeared on the market the picture was incorrectly identified as The Angel of Death, the title of two other works by De Morgan – although given the symbolism of the painting it is easy to understand the misidentification. In choosing to represent the moment that the surviving souls of the dead are being taken from the corporal into the spiritual realm the painting connects deeply with Evelyn De Morgan’s Spiritualist beliefs.

Spiritualism arrived in Britain from America in the middle of the nineteenth century, and flourished as an antidote to the religious doubt fostered by Darwin's evolutionary theories. Through communicating with the dead, through rappings, seances and automatic writings and drawings, Spiritualists sought to provide empirical evidence as to the existence of the soul. Furthermore, they extended Darwin's evolutionary theory of continual improvement into the spiritual realm, believing that the soul survives death and evolves through various progressive states (comparable to reincarnation) before arriving at eventual spiritual enlightenment.

We are grateful to Sarah Hardy, curator of The De Morgan Foundation, for her assistance in cataloguing this work.