Medea

Exhibited in 1889 and now at the Williamson Art Gallery and Museum in Birkenhead, De Morgan's 'Medea' confronts perhaps the most morally extreme female figure in Greek mythology — the sorceress-princess who murdered her own children in revenge for her husband's betrayal. Victorian treatments of Medea were contested: some condemned, others sought to explain. De Morgan, characteristically, situates Medea within the Spiritualist-alchemical world of magical practice that runs through several of her works, presenting the figure as a woman of formidable but destructive power caught at a moment of terrible knowledge. The painting's date, 1889, falls within a period of sustained debate about women's legal status in marriage and divorce — a context that would have given Medea's revenge a contemporary charge. De Morgan's decision to paint Medea rather than, for instance, the more benign Circe, signals a willingness to engage with the darkest aspects of female mythological power rather than confining herself to more palatable heroines.

The canvas employs a deep, jewelled palette of dark green, crimson, and gold, evoking the opulence and danger of Colchis and Corinth. Medea's figure is strongly lit from below or within, a theatrical device that externalises her interior fire. The detailed rendering of magical apparatus in the foreground foregrounds material practice over supernatural mystery.