This indicated that Houghton wanted her seance work to gain merit as art in itself, but she also used the exhibition to expose spiritualist ideas to the general public.Īmong other British mediums who painted or drew in trance-states or during seances, reportedly under the influence of spirits, were Anna Mary Howitt, Barbara Honywood, Catherine Berry, David Duguid, Jane Stewart Smith, and William and Elizabeth Wilkinson. In 1871, Houghton also chose to exhibit her work and she rented a gallery in Old Bond Street to present her spirit drawings to a London audience. Only 40 of these now survive and a vibrant sample have been chosen for display at the Courtauld exhibition. Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance, 1882. In 1861, she developed her skills as an artistic medium and throughout the 1860s and 1870s produced hundreds of symbolic artworks. At the age of 45, she first became interested in spiritualism after the death of her younger sister and began attending seances.
Georgiana Houghton (1814–1884) was one of many artistic British mediums. This included a form of creative mediumship in which drawings and paintings were produced during seances. Spiritualism arrived in Britain in the early 1850s where it gained widespread popularity and caused a considerable cultural impact. A medium was someone who was perceived to have a special sensitivity to spirit communication, and through whom it was believed such communication across the two worlds was possible. Central to this movement were spirit mediums. Spiritualists believed that the human spirit survives death and continues to take an active interest in the mortal world. Modern Spiritualism began as a movement in America in the 1840s, and its origin is often attributed to the Fox sisters of Hydesville. The exhibition contributes to an emerging area of art historical re-evaluation of this period, which intends to change our understanding of 19th-century art. Georgiana Houghton’s spirit drawings are pioneering examples of abstract art and a selection of these are now on display at the Courtauld Institute in London. As Houghton herself declared, her work was “without parallel in the world”. Claiming to be under the direction of her spirit guides, Houghton drew extraordinarily vibrant and colourful expressions of spiritual abstraction unlike anything seen before in art. In the 19th century, in a dim gas-lit seance parlour, the spirits of Titian and Correggio returned to the mortal world to guide the hand of a medium artist, Georgiana Houghton.
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