The life of the artist Simeon Solomon reads like the rise and fall of a celebrity. He was born in London on 9 October 1840, the last of eight children in an artistically-inclined middle class Jewish family. His mother Kate Levy Solomon was an amateur artist of miniatures, and his elder siblings Abraham (1823-1862) and Rebecca (1832-1886) were artists who were influential on Solomon’s early artistic development. He was officially admitted to the Royal Academy Schools on 24 April 1856, having been proposed by the Victorian painter Augustus Egg, R.A. About this time Solomon started an informal Sketching Club with his fellow students and friends Marcus Stone and Henry Holiday.
Solomon was early on influenced by Shakespeare and the Bible. His juvenilia reveals the influence of the then popular Pre-Raphaelites on him, in particular the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whom he met probably in 1858 or shortly thereafter. It was also in 1858 that Solomon exhibited his first Royal Academy work, a drawing entitled “Isaac Offered”, and two additional drawings at the Ernest Gambart’s Winter Exhibition. Around 1860 Solomon met others in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, including Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. Georgiana Burne-Jones would recall later in life how Edward and she would marvel over Solomon’s skill as a draughtsman and how popular his sketchbooks were at the time. |
Nearly all of Solomon’s later work, of which there are perhaps four-hundred-plus known examples in existence, reflect his personal iconography or vision. Greatly influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s early poetry, this vision is rooted in his 1871 prose poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, which describes a narrator and his soul journeying through an unknown landscape whilst in a dream state where they experience visions of various forms and conditions of true love. Solomon’s personal journey of same-sex love, or ‘Divine Love’ as he alludes to it in the poem, reveals itself in the hundreds of works, many of them small chalk or pencil drawings and watercolours, produced over a period of thirty-three years from 1873 that reveal a complex private mythology of ideas which encompass a spiritual mix of Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Greek myth. Many of these images maintain Solomon’s earlier use of the sexual and moral ambiguity of the androgyne but are generally simpler in composition than his earlier work, often concentrating on an image of one or two heads in profile. The artist’s later work also reveals a move from the Pre-Raphaelitism of Rossetti to the fantasy of Symbolist imagery which suited his unique and personal journey.
In the 1880s and ‘90s, despite a dependency on alcohol, periods of chronic poverty and time spent in and out of the St. Giles Workhouse in one of London’s poorest areas, Solomon continued to work, supported by friends and family who had not abandoned him. His drawings and |
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