Head of a youth

The present compositional format was a recurrent one in Solomon's oeuvre. A similar watercolour was sold in these Rooms 20 November 2003, lot 141 entitled Study of a woman and dated 1894. A further version, Head of a Young Man is in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, dated 1888. The sexual ambiguity of the sitters' features is something seen in much of Solomon's work. A. Symons refers to such works in his book From Toulouse-Lautrec to Rodin, London, 1929, p. 156: 'These faces are without sex: they have brooded among the ghosts of passion till they have become the ghosts of themselves: the energy of virtue or of sex has gone out of them, and they hang in space, dry, rattling, the husks of desire.'.