The Enchanted Interior review: The real discovery here is the brilliance of women 

The real discovery here is the brilliance of women: The Enchanted Interior show at the Laing Art Gallery asks a very 21st century question

The Enchanted Interior

Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle                                                     Until February 22

Rating:

Some strange women are gathered at the Laing Art Gallery right now. Sorceresses mixing love potions, scarlet goddesses and, in William Holman Hunt’s Isabella And The Pot Of Basil, a deranged lover who keeps her boyfriend’s severed head in a vase. 

They are part of an intriguing show that uses contemporary art and 19th-century painting to ask a very 21st century question: why can’t women do what they want?

Over three big rooms, choices from the museum’s impressive collection are mixed with striking loans. These include the pioneering Victorian photographs of Lady Clementina Hawarden, who used stereoscopic photography as an early form of 3D – one of the series 5 Princes Gardens feels particularly contemporary yet, remarkably, it was taken in 1861. 

In The Love Potion, 1903 by Evelyn De Morgan (above), a sorceress mixes a bewitching draft, but the dazzling gold dress is an enchantment in itself

In The Love Potion, 1903 by Evelyn De Morgan (above), a sorceress mixes a bewitching draft, but the dazzling gold dress is an enchantment in itself

A woman stands at the window in what appears to be a ballroom, her hand raised to the glass. The nets are pulled aside and light floods in but she can only look out at the world.

Likewise, the woman in John Frederick Lewis’s masterful watercolour Hhareem Life – Constantinople, is confined, this time in a sumptuous tiled interior. In Laus Veneris by Edward Burne-Jones a scarlet-clad Venus reclines at the table with a crown on her lap. 

Languid yet intense, is she jailer or jailed?

Burne-Jones’s women are often beestung and palely post-coital; Evelyn De Morgan’s are strong and boldly coloured. In The Love Potion, a sorceress mixes a bewitching draft, but the dazzling gold dress is an enchantment in itself. 

In The Gilded Cage, De Morgan’s final work, a red-headed woman in fine silks is kept in luxurious captivity by a wealthy man. More fool such men, for the real discovery here is the brilliance of women. 

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