Love at the waters of oblivion

The subject here comes from Solomon's ambitious 1871 prose poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, which although privately printed, bears the imprint of F.S. Ellis, Rossetti's publisher. An account of a series of manifestations of embodied love, experienced in a trance, Solomon took many of its episodes as the subjects for drawings and paintings around the time of its publication. The present drawing, however, is the only one known on this theme, and is dated 20 years after the publication, suggesting that the poem continued to provide inspiration throughout his life.