Physics, Psychical Research, and the Self: Evelyn De Morgan's Spiritualist Portraits.

This article analyzes the spiritualist artist Evelyn De Morgan’s representation of the self in several early 20th-century paintings, focusing particularly on her rarely studied portraits. It argues that De Morgan’s depiction of the self aligns with contemporary scientific and psychical theories by Frederic W. H. Myers and Oliver Lodge, who described the self as immortal, composite, mutable, and existing beyond the material body within an imponderable ether. De Morgan’s portraits, such as *William De Morgan Holding a Vase* (1909), visually embody these ideas by destabilizing the face as a site of psychological depth and instead representing the self as an etherial, mutable entity that coheres through symbolic objects and spatial distortions informed by non-Euclidean geometries. The article situates De Morgan’s work within the intertwined fin-de-siècle contexts of spiritualism, science, and emerging mathematical concepts, highlighting her unique contribution to spiritualist aesthetics and the art of the invisible in British painting.