Welcome to the new look SSRA website!
 Simeon Solomon c1860s
The purpose of this website is to encourage research into the work of Simeon Solomon, who until recently was still an obscure Victorian artist known only to those interested in Pre-Raphaelite studies. Over the past thirty years increased interest in the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes, Jewish studies, and Gender/Gay/Queer studies has generated a resurgence of information on Solomon and his work. It seems that more criticism has been pubished about him in the past twenty years than had been published in the fifty years prior.
The site is researched, edited and maintained by Dr. Carolyn Conroy (University of York) and Roberto C. Ferrari (CUNY Graduate Center). We have both spent many years studying Solomon's life and work. For more about us and our work click here. |
What you will find on this site
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© Univ of Aberystwyth
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Simeon Solomon History
Simeon Solomon was born in 1840 into a prosperous Jewish family in the City of London. He was the youngest of eight children, of whom eldest brother Abraham and sister Rebecca were also artists. Solomon would become the most famous of his artistic siblings, befriending and working alongside Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, fraternising with poet Algernon Swinburne, and exhibiting at the Royal Academy and Dudley Gallery in London. His wealthy patrons included Lord Battersea, Eleanor Tong Coltart, and James Leathart. However, in 1873, at the height of his artistic fame, Solomon was arrested and convicted of attempted sodomy in a public urinal off Oxford Street in London. This arrest effectively brought an end to Solomon’s public career; however, he continued to produce a large body of work until his death in 1905. The last thirty-three years of his life were undoubtedly affected by an addiction to alcohol, which is more than likely responsible for the erratic state of his life, which appears to have been lived both in and out of poverty. Despite this, Solomon's work and perceived bohemian lifestyle was admired by Rhymers’ Club poets Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, and was he was befriended by the eccentric poet and Baltic/German aristocrat Count Stenbock. Solomon died at St Giles’s Workhouse in Bloomsbury in 1905.
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