Simeon Solomon - heads ...

[LOVE, JOY, PEACE, LONGSUFFERING, GENTLENESS, GOODNESS, FAITH, MEEKNESS, TEMPERANCE]

signed and dated l.l.: S Solomon 1890

oil on canvas

18 by 67 in.
Hammer Price with Buyer's Premium: 21,600 GBP

In his later career Simeon Solomon often painted and drew single heads, sometimes intended to illustrate narrative, thematic or symbolical subjects, or simply representing abstract personifications, or – as on this occasion – human virtues. The present painting is remarkable, and perhaps unique, in representing the heads of nine haloed women, to each of which is attached a lettered cartouche identifying the virtue for which she stands. Each face has a distinct physiognomic character, although all are immediately recognisable physical types as seen in other works by the artist.

As a young man, Solomon had been a member of the circle of artists which gathered around Rossetti, whom he seems to have met in about 1857. Other friends of Solomon’s among painters, designers and writers were Edward Burne-Jones, George Price Boyce, William Burges and Algernon Charles Swinburne. Solomon painted and drew subjects from the Old Testament and of religious ritual – often inspired by own Jewish upbringing in the East End of London. In 1865 the inception of the Dudley Gallery allowed Solomon an opportunity to exhibit, and perhaps to sell, works of a wider range of subjects. In the later 1860s, he adopted the Aesthetic classical style that became a mark of the progressive school of painters. Works by him such as Habet! (a subject set in the Roman Coliseum, in which a group of women decide the fate of an unseen gladiator) and Autumn Love (both private collections), of 1865 and 1866, respectively, represent alternative approaches to a supposedly classical type.

Solomon’s professional standing and personal reputation was destroyed in 1873 when he was arrested and later convicted for homosexual offences. Shunned by his former friends and causing outrage by selling letters that he had received from Swinburne and others in the years before his disgrace, Solomon fell on hard times. In 1885 he was admitted to the St Giles Workhouse, Endell Street, being described as a ‘broken-down artist’. This was to be his home for the remaining twenty years of his life.

Solomon continued to draw and paint, and succeeded in marketing and selling works such as the present although he had no access to public exhibitions or art associations. There were those who remembered the considerable reputation that Solomon had enjoyed in the 1860s, and perhaps continued to hold his work in esteem. Various articles were published about him, and on occasions works from his early career were included in survey exhibitions. In some degree, he seems to have become a cult figure among aesthetically minded art lovers of the late century. Oscar Wilde, for example, had a number of drawings by Simeon Solomon, all of which were sold at the sale of the contents of his Chelsea home after his arrest and bankruptcy. Wilde expressed regret at their loss, reproaching Alfred Douglas for not having saved them, in De Profundis (1897).

CSN
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