A collector’s guide to Simeon Solomon

Simeon Solomon is quite possibly the greatest Victorian artist you’ve never heard of. A child prodigy who showed at the Royal Academy aged 18, he went on to become a vital member of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. His contemporary, Edward Burne-Jones, called him ‘the best of us all’.

Solomon built up a major reputation with paintings such as The Mother of Moses, and was one of a select group of artists invited to work on the Great Bookcase for designer William Burges (regarded by many as the finest piece of all Victorian furniture). ‘No survey or study of late-19th-century English art is complete without him,’ says Colin Cruise, emeritus professor of art history at Aberystwyth University. ‘Solomon was an utterly integral figure.’ The question remains, why is he so relatively little-known today?

The answer dates back to a life-changing incident in 1873. At that point, Solomon was in his mid-thirties and at the peak of his career. However, on the evening of 11 February, he was caught in a sexual act with another man and arrested. Such conduct was illegal at the time, and Solomon was sentenced to 18 months' imprisonment with light labour. That was commuted to a fine of £100, but the artist’s reputation and career never recovered.

‘This was Victorian Britain, and the public shame attached to such an incident was permanent,’ Cruise explains. ‘High-profile friends and supporters [such as the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti] swiftly turned their backs on him.’

In many ways, Solomon’s case — of a gay cultural figure outed and ostracised by society — prefigured that of Oscar Wilde two decades later. However, a key difference is that where Wilde survived for just five years after his arrest, Solomon lived for more than three decades after his, much of that time spent destitute and homeless. He turned increasingly to alcohol and ended his days — in 1905, aged 64 — in the Saint Giles Workhouse in Holborn.

Yet Solomon never stopped working. Admittedly, after his arrest he had precious few patrons commissioning large-scale paintings from him; plus, he could generally no longer afford oils and canvas. However, he continued to work on paper (and, occasionally, on pavements, when he was living on the streets). ‘Solomon was at his most original, intense and provocative on paper rather than on canvas,’ says Cruise.

The son of a milliner, Solomon was from a middle-class, Orthodox Jewish family. As a young artist, he was renowned, above all, for his scenes of the Old Testament — particularly for the perceived authenticity of his Jewish costumes, artefacts and accessories.

In time, under the influence of Rossetti, he would progress to imagery that was, says Cruise, ‘less overtly religious but more broadly spiritual or mystical’. In other words, more Pre-Raphaelite. He became increasingly fond, for example, of depicting the female personifications of Night and Sleep together.

Not that the gender of Solomon’s figures was ever really clear-cut. They had a tendency, like Rossetti’s, to look androgynous — something that ruffled the feathers of many critics. Writing in Contemporary Review magazine in 1871, Robert Buchanan said that Solomon’s works were ‘veritable monsters’, being unimpressed by what he saw as the ‘sickly effeminacy’ of ostensibly male subjects.

So did the artist’s style change in any significant way after his arrest? ‘Yes, I’d argue that he develops a new sense of beauty,’ says Cruise. ‘A beautiful moodiness, that is. His works become suffused with a kind of melancholia.’

Another development was his new-found preference for close-up drawings and oil paintings of heads in profile. The Knight of the Lord's Passion, sold at Christie’s in London in 2018, is a fine example.

These works allow us a focused look at his subjects, with the hope, perhaps, of even reading their thoughts. However, these are introspective souls — riddles even — and their thoughts aren’t to be shared. In this respect, Solomon is often said to have become a Symbolist in his latter years, with an obvious similarity to be drawn with the disembodied heads of French artist Odilon Redon.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, one Victorian who admired him through thick and thin was Wilde. In 1877, in an article written as a student at Oxford, the playwright even described the artist as a ‘genius’. He would go on to purchase a number of Solomon’s drawings — and be hit hard by having to give up those works when he was declared bankrupt in 1896.

Writing from Reading Gaol a year later to his former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, in a letter known as ‘De Profundis’, Wilde lamented ‘that all my charming things were… sold: my Burne-Jones drawings; my Whistler drawings; my Monticelli; my Simeon Solomons; my china, my library.’

Solomon’s reputation saw a brief revival in the years after his death. More than 50 of his works featured in an exhibition of Jewish art at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1906, for instance. Two years later, the American writer Julia Ellsworth Ford published a study of his paintings, Simeon Solomon: An Appreciation.

It wasn’t much of a revival, however. For almost a century afterwards, Solomon vanished from view. It wasn’t until the late 1980s that the theatre director Neil Bartlett staged A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, a one-man show inspired by the artist; and it was only in 2005 — the centenary of his death — that Solomon had a major retrospective, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. (Curated by Cruise, it later transferred to Munich’s Museum Villa Stuck.) Half a dozen of his works opened Tate Britain’s successful 2017 exhibition, Queer British Art 1861–1967.

In July 2018, Christie's sold 26 works by Solomon spanning a wide range in terms of date, subject and medium. They included Love, an early drawing executed in 1858 when the artist was 18; an 1874 watercolour of a Greek Orthodox bishop blessing his congregation; a monochrome pencil drawing, from 1896, of the mythological hero Orpheus in profile; and an 1862 illustration of an episode from the biblical tale of Ruth and Boaz. There were also a number of gorgeous works in red chalk.

In 2027, the Delaware Art Museum is presenting a show that directly addresses the prejudice faced by the artist in his lifetime. Simeon Solomon: Queer and Jewish in Victorian London opens on 13 March.

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