How the Victorians brought famous artists back from the dead in seances

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. 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. As Houghton herself declared, her work was “without parallel in the world”.

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. 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.

A new spiritualism

Modern Spiritualism began as a movement in America in the 1840s, and its origin is often attributed to the Fox sisters of Hydesville. Spiritualists believed that the human spirit survives death and continues to take an active interest in the mortal world. Central to this movement were spirit mediums. 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.

Spiritualism arrived in Britain in the early 1850s where it gained widespread popularity and caused a considerable cultural impact. This included a form of creative mediumship in which drawings and paintings were produced during seances.

Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884) was one of many artistic British mediums. At the age of 45, she first became interested in spiritualism after the death of her younger sister and began attending seances. In 1861, she developed her skills as an artistic medium and throughout the 1860s and 1870s produced hundreds of symbolic artworks.

Only 40 of these now survive and a vibrant sample have been chosen for display at the Courtauld exhibition. 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. 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.

Georgiana Houghton, Evenings at Home in Spiritual Seance, 1882

Among 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. Importantly, these medium artists were significant contributors to a major 19th-century movement – Modern Spiritualism – which spanned across the globe from America to Australia, from Scotland to South Africa.

Their work ranged from abstract shapes to figurative forms, yet while their styles differed they were unified by the same goal, which was to use artistic mediumship to convince the viewer of the “truth”: that the spirit world existed and that spirits could interact with the living.

Life after death

Seance drawings and paintings were deemed to be spirit artefacts by fellow spiritualists. In order to understand both the visual language and the spiritual status of such artworks there was an emphasis on the way in which they were created. The medium would often go into a trance, during which it was believed that he or she would channel the spirit who would then author the artwork.