Evelyn De Morgan

Evelyn De Morgan trained at the Slade School in London in the 1870s, at a time when a woman pursuing a professional career in painting was still unusual, and she kept at it for more than 40 years. Her teacher and family friend was the painter George Frederic Watts, and she drew on the Pre-Raphaelites and on Botticelli, whose long-limbed figures and clear colour she had studied in Italy.

Her subjects were allegories: figures standing for hope, for imprisonment, for the soul freed from the body. After she married the potter and novelist William De Morgan in 1887, the couple shared a deep interest in spiritualism and in women's suffrage, and that mysticism runs all through her later canvases.

The First World War turned her toward open pacifism. She painted more than a dozen works against war in her final years, selling some to raise money for the Red Cross, and died in London in 1919, months after the fighting stopped.