Night and Sleep

Night and Sleep is an 1878 painting by Evelyn De Morgan, an English painter whose works were influenced by the style of the Pre-Raphaelite movement.

His relaxed pose is set against the "more energetic line of his mother's body."

Art historian Elise Lawton Smith notes that the couple's "horizontality suggests both sleep and lateral movement as they pass across the landscape".

One of the first ever female pupils at London's Slade School, she has littered this work with hidden feminist symbolism.

Whilst the scene depicts the arrival of sleep it can also be interpreted as "entering an new dawn, where the figure will awake to a world of equal gender rights, ready, like de Morgan, to make their mark.