LONDON.- By September 2019, you will be able to see more of the De Morgan collection than ever before. With three new exhibitions opening, a new website going live and launching the paintings on Google Arts & Culture, this is the summer of bringing brilliant De Morgan artwork to the modern world.

The De Morgan Collection is vast, comprising some 60 oils paintings, 800 ceramics and an archive of materials pertaining to the artists who created them. Evelyn De Morgan (1855 – 1919), was a radical feminist and spiritualist painter who redeveloped the Pre-Raphaelite style, and her husband, William De Morgan (1839 – 1917), the leading ceramicist of William Morris’s Arts and Crafts movement.

Since the collection was bequeathed 1965, it has been displayed through loans to other museums or kept locked away in store, and minimal information has been available online. The new De Morgan website, developed by Big Frank, Battersea, changes that. Optimised for both desktop and mobile, from 29th August 2019, www.demorgan.org.uk will allow our visitors to fully search our extensive collection, book their place on free and ticketed events, find out where they can visit De Morgan displays and exhibitions of the ceramics and artworks, and shop our new range of stunning products.

Getting up close and personal with the collection will be possible like never before from 29th August when you will be able to view Evelyn De Morgan’s paintings on the Google Arts & Culture Platform. This year, the De Morgan Foundation has partnered with Google Arts & Culture to have the Google Art Camera capture high resolution gigapixel images of the oil paintings in the collection. The images available are so detailed that even conservators haven’t seen these delectable oils in such detail before.

Wherever you are in the world this summer, De Morgan will be digitally available to you. By making all of the collection available online, the De Morgan Foundation hopes to entice you to visit a new display of the artworks at one of its partner museums.

At Cannon Hall in Barnsley, ‘A Family of Artists’ will showcase important paintings Evelyn De Morgan made between 1883 – 4 whilst in West Yorkshire and working closely with her uncle, the Pre-Raphaelite artist John Roddam Spencer-Stanhope. The two artists shared ideas and decorated the local churches with murals, organ panels and Morris & Co stained glass. It was perhaps through these connections that this was also the year Evelyn met William De Morgan, introducing another artist to the family. This new display will open on Thursday 22nd August.

The Watts Gallery in Surrey will open ‘Decoration or Devotion?’ on 30th August. Couples are often seen as ensembles. In their politics, Evelyn and William De Morgan abided by this. However, in their art, they parted ways. Evelyn’s meaningful Spiritualist pictures differ greatly from William’s purely decorative appropriation of global culture and aesthetics. This exhibition invites you to observe their artwork and to consider what, where and why certain motifs and symbols appear in Evelyn's paintings and William's ceramics. Looking at the lives and works of the De Morgans, we can compare the routes of design and of devotion taken by each artist.

A new exhibition at Wightwick Manor in Wolverhampton invites visitors to ‘Look Beneath the Lustre’ of the De Morgan’s artwork, opens 1st September 2019. More preparatory drawings and sketches by William and Evelyn De Morgan will be on display than ever before, inviting the visitor to consider the people and preparation behind the paintings and the plates. Both William and Evelyn De Morgan made beautiful creations to adorn the Aesthetic Interior of homes like Wightwick Manor. The Manders were interested in the stories behind the art more so than the visual, and Wightwick’s collection includes sketchbooks and preparatory drawings by Evelyn and tile papers, tiles and plates by William. The exhibition will examine the De Morgan’s creation of fine and decorative arts for the most beautiful art movement of the late-19th century and how they inspired a Manor.