Year 1919 Location De Morgan Centre Dimensions 78 cm x 1.05 m Media Oil paint | Medium Oil on canvas Artist Evelyn De Morgan Created 1919 Support Canvas | |
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Period Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Similar Aurora Triumphans, Night and Sleep, The Love Potion | ||
The Gilded Cage is an oil painting by Evelyn De Morgan, with apparent stylistic influences of spatial representation from Surrealist modes of thought. It was her final work before her death in 1919. It is essentially an allegory for female hypnotic delirium.
In this painting, a woman "looks out" from what seems to be a window that may, in fact, be a scene from a mural painting within the greater composition with her hand stretched out and up in a gesture of yearning. She is looking at what may be compared to a group of gypsy figures, dancing under the open sky. The principal figure among the travelling group is a woman who dances while holding her baby close to her, thus otherwise suggesting the scene is representional for an altered-state vision of maternal duty.
Soaring free about the dancing group is a bird, which contrasts sharply to the captive bird in the gilded cage that hangs beside the woman's older husband. The husband seems distraught at his wife's deteriorated - or "released" - state of mind.