Simeon Solomon

Sale, New York, Christie's East, 1 October 1996, lot 50

In contrast to the traditional genre scenes painted by his older siblings Abraham and Rebecca, Simeon Solomon developed a more visionary approach to art. He studied at the Royal Academy Schools from 1855 and exhibited his first picture at the Academy, The Mother of Moses, in 1860. His unique style was partly developed from the paintings of his friends Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Albert Moore and the poetry of Algernon Swinburne with, all of whom he was closely associated in the 1860s. During this early period in his life, he was hailed as a genius and much praised for his bold illustrations of biblical scenes, some of which were made for Dalziel’s famous bible, and for his drawings of Jewish life and ritual. In 1871 everything changed when he was arrested for ‘homosexual conduct’ and his reputation was entirely ruined. He withdrew from his former life and descended into the squalor of the St Giles Workhouse in Holborn, making money by selling matches on the street. With his meagre earnings he bought artist’s materials and continued to draw (usually in coloured chalk) and his work developed a haunting Symbolist intensity. With a few loyal patrons and sympathetic friends, Solomon survived for over thirty years living this precarious life and producing some of the most remarkable drawings of the period. Throughout the 1880s and 1890s his pictures were popular among the undergraduate students of Oxford and the champion of the Aesthetes Oscar Wilde wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol about his regret at the loss of his cherished drawings by Solomon. Following his death in 1905, accelerated by chronic alcoholism, his work was exhibited at the Baillie Gallery in London and at the Winter exhibition at the Royal Academy. In modern times his work has been re-assesed and he has been reinstated as one of the most important members of the Aesthetic movement and in a wider European context, an active exponent of Symbolism. This powerful androgynous, allegorical drawing is typical of Solomon’s later drawings, anguished but beautiful, intense but sensitive.