Of Evelyn de Morgan’s roughly one hundred oils, fifty-six are held in perpetuity by the de Morgan Foundation; of those that remain in private hands, Clytie is one of the finest. It was painted in the experimental medium de Morgan and her husband William called 'the process', in which oil was suspended in glycerine to secure the brilliancy of its colour, and she employed it on only two canvases in her career, the present work and The Soul's Prison House (1880-88, de Morgan Foundation). The 2025 Guildhall retrospective, Evelyn De Morgan: The Modern Painter in Victorian London, has returned her to the centre of the national conversation about late-Victorian painting, and into that conversation Clytie re-enters as one of the most assured achievements of her early maturity.

Painted across 1886 and 1887 and exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in the same year as her marriage to the novelist and ceramicist William de Morgan, the canvas reframes a story from the fourth book of Ovid's Metamorphoses into a meditation on devotion, dissolution, and the grace of becoming something other than oneself. De Morgan, niece and pupil of the Pre-Raphaelite painter John Roddam Spencer Stanhope, was among the first generation of women to train at the Slade School of Fine Art, where she won the Slade Scholarship in her first year. Prolonged winters in Florence steeped her in the linear poise of Botticelli and the gilded gravity of the early Sienese, and by her mid-twenties she had begun exhibiting at the Grosvenor. What distinguishes her from her male contemporaries is a sustained preoccupation with the interior life of the female figure, and with the constraints Victorian convention placed upon it, or released it from through the fertile loophole of myth.

Ovid's Clytie, an Oceanid daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, loved the sun god Apollo with the absoluteness of a bloom turned towards dawn. When he abandoned her for the princess Leucothoë, she sat naked upon the bare ground for nine days, refusing food and drink, following only the chariot across the sky. Her limbs then rooted, her pallor greened, and her face became the flower that still pursues the light: the heliotrope, which Victorian sensibility conflated with the heavier, more theatrical Helianthus, or common sunflower.

What sets de Morgan’s treatment of the subject apart from other interpretations is the moment chosen. Other examples tended to depict Clytie either still wholly human or already wholly floral. Frederic, Lord Leighton, in his last, unfinished canvas of 1895–1896 (Leighton House Museum), showed the nymph kneeling in profile, arms flung wide before an altar of fruit, entreating the setting Sun to return. George Frederic Watts, who returned to the subject repeatedly from the late 1860s, produced the celebrated Clytie bust in plaster, marble, and bronze, versions now at Tate, the Guildhall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Watts Gallery, Compton, capturing a violent torsion of the shoulders as petals begin to climb the breast. Both men read the subject as one of struggle; both pitched it at the highest volume.

De Morgan does something different. Her Clytie has stopped looking. Eyes closed, chin inclined sharply to the shoulder, she raises both arms to shield her face against the sun she no longer dares to watch: the left crosses the brow, the right reaches up and back into her own hair, and the gesture reads simultaneously as aversion and as self-enfolding.

At her feet, and rising to enclose hips, waist, and wrist, surges a concourse of sunflowers, painted with exceptional accuracy. It is here that 'the process' does its work: oil suspended in glycerine, laid over reflective grounds in the manner de Morgan would later perfect with oil over gold leaf, and producing the jewel-like saturation visible throughout the canvas. When the Reverend George Tugwell, the naturalist-parson who purchased the picture from the artist in 1907 for his home at Lee in North Devon, wrote to ask whether two of the sunflower leaves might be altered, de Morgan politely refused, explaining that the work had been painted 'in a peculiar method to obtain the brilliancy of the colour and varnished, so that any attempt to change now would damage the quality of the painting' (quoted in Catherine Gordon, Evelyn de Morgan: Oil Paintings, London, 1996, p. 18).

Iconographically, the blooms are the instrument of Clytie's metamorphosis, but they had also become, by the mid-1880s, the emblem par excellence of Aestheticism; Oscar Wilde famously carried one down Piccadilly, and the plant had settled into shorthand for the whole movement. de Morgan, therefore, paints her heroine simultaneously merging with a mythological species and embodying the insignia of the very circle in which she worked. The conceit is wry, self-aware, and unusual for an image so emotionally grave. The subject invites comparison with Edward Burne-Jones's The Tree of Forgiveness (1881–1882, Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight), exhibited at the Grosvenor five years before Clytie, in which Phyllis emerges from the almond tree into which grief had dissolved her. Burne-Jones's nude is wrapped in the tree, struggling outward; de Morgan's is being wrapped, settling inward. As Elise Smith's writes, in de Morgan’s reading, women shed the constraints of domestic embodiment by becoming the elements themselves, wave, dawn, flame, flower (E. Smith, Evelyn Pickering de Morgan and the Allegorical Body, Madison, New Jersey, 2002, pp. 86–89).

A pastel study of Clytie is recorded from 1885 (National Trust, Wightwick Manor), while the finished oil was acquired directly from de Morgan by the Reverend George Tugwell, remaining within the family for decades before making its first appearance at auction in 1972, nearly one hundred years on from its creation. A rare and important example, it is a statement of a movement's ambitions and of de Morgan’s independent artistic creativity and mind.