| Night and Sleep | |
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 | |
| Artist | Evelyn De Morgan |
| Year | 1878 |
| Medium | Oil on canvas |
| Location | Wightwick Manor, Wolverhampton, England |
Night and Sleep is an 1878 painting by Evelyn De Morgan, an English painter whose works were influenced by the style of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. 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.
Hidden Feminist Symbolism
One of the first ever female pupils at London's Slade School, she has littered this work with hidden feminist symbolism. Whilst the scene depicts the arrival of sleep it can also be interpreted as "entering an new dawn, where the figure will awake to a world of equal gender rights, ready, like de Morgan, to make their mark."
References
- Lawton Smith, Elise (2002). Evelyn Pickering De Morgan and the Allegorical Body. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ Press. p. 241. ISBN 978-0-8386-3883-5.
- Hessel, Katy (2022). The Story of Art Without Men. Hutchinson Heinemann. p. 93. ISBN 978-1-529-15114-5.
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