Esoteric Art Confronting the Public Eye: The Abstract Spirit Drawings of Georgiana Houghton

Abstract

he term “Victorian art” commonly brings to mind narrative works rich in anecdotal detail. Abstraction seems far away, part of a different century and a different place—twentieth-century Germany, Russia, and France, not nineteenth-century England. Some well-known Victorian artists did begin the process of abstraction—James McNeill Whistler, Albert Moore, and other artists associated with the aesthetic movement minimized subject matter and placed greater emphasis on the material qualities of painting. Yet even aestheticism remained figurative, as the product was never fully abstract. Given the lack of abstraction within Victorian visual culture, watercolors such as those painted by the artist Georgiana Houghton in the 1860s and 1870s seem shockingly out of place. In her work The Eye of God from 1862 (fig. 1), we see a tangle of transparent straight, wavy, and spiraling lines flowing out of the left corner of the paper and up from the bottom edge of the page as white filaments float across the surface. No recognizable forms appear; all that is visible are lines and colors—yellow, sepia, and blue. There is an organic quality to the undulations, a sense of microscopic detail, and a feeling of being in a deep-sea world or otherwise mysterious place. The vagueness of the imagery contrasts with the specificity of the title, which evokes a dense underlying symbolism. Houghton attributed meaning to particular shapes, colors, and directions in her paintings. While her works were abstract, they remained representational. Born in the Canary Islands in 1814, Houghton spent most of her life in London, working as an artist and a Spiritualist medium. 1 In her youth, Houghton had trained as a painter, but she gave up her artistic practice in 1851 when her youngest sister died. In 1859, still in mourning for her sister, Houghton became attracted to Spiritualism and especially to the idea that the spirit survives after the death of the body and can communicate with the living through a human medium. T