Bacchus - Simeon Solomon. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Bequeathed by Katharine Elizabeth Lewis, 1961.
Oscar Wilde called him a ‘strange genius’ and Edward Burne Jones praised him as the ‘greatest artist of all’ but Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, at the Ben Uri Gallery until November 26 2006, is the first major exhibition of Simeon Solomon to be seen in London since 1906.
Known to fans of Pre-Raphaelite art as the outsider who died alone in poverty after being ostracised for his homosexuality, the exhibition demonstrates Solomon’s re-emergence as a significant figure within the Pre-Raphaelite circle and late 19th century British art.
It also uncovers a powerful and original talent with a unique vision with many of the works seen here for the first time since the 1860s and 1870s.
Organised by the great repository of Solomon’s artwork, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, the exhibition covers Solomon's entire career and includes his fascinating later works after his arrest and disgrace in 1873.
Babylon Hath Been A Golden Cup (detail), Simeon Solomon. Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. Purchased (Alfred Leadbeater Bequest Fund) 1925.
Solomon was born into an observant Jewish family in the East End of London in 1840. His elder brother Abraham (1823-62) and sister Rebecca (1832-86) were enjoying some success as artists and he showed precocious artistic talent from an early age. In 1856, aged just 15, he entered the Royal Academy to pursue an artistic career himself.
He quickly enjoyed success with his paintings of Old Testament scenes, Jewish ritual and classical subjects and soon became a popular figure within the Pre-Raphaelite circle of artists, writers and aesthetes including Burne-Jones, Rossetti and Swinburne, who enjoyed his company and admired his work.
An active homosexual at a time when homosexuality was taboo, Solomon was soon considered the bad boy of the movement. His homosexuality led to his fall from grace and ruined his professional career when in February 1873, aged 32, he was arrested in a public lavatory and charged with indecent exposure and "attempting to commit sodomy".
He was subsequently ostracised from the artistic community, the Jewish community and society as a whole and it became almost impossible for him to exhibit publicly and increasingly difficult for him to sell his work.
Love in Autumn, Simeon Solomon. Private collection.
Growing poverty, an unwillingness to depend on the charity of family and friends who were still prepared to support him, and an increasing dependence on alcohol led him to a life of beggary and illness on the streets of London.
The last years of his life were spent in a workhouse in London where he continued to practise as an artist, producing deeply personal drawings charged with mystical and visionary intensity. He died in the workhouse in 1905 and is buried in the Willesden Jewish cemetery.
This major exhibition moves through his early Jewish themed paintings through his Pre-Raphaelite period showing rapt individuals and classic themes. There are some fine examples of Solomon’s treatment of the male nude and his later abstract works that reflected his alcoholic state.
These, perhaps more than any of the other paintings and drawings on show, personify abstract themes such as Night, Love and Death and their imagery is frequently derived from the prose poem, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.
It is these later works that reveal a compositional inventiveness and visionary quality that continued to influence artists in the late 19th century and early 20th century. There are interesting parallels with the work of the pre-Modernist avant-garde in Europe and America including the Symbolist painters, such as Gustav Klimt as well as photographer Fred Holland Day.
