Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites
Traveling exhibit, 2006
Catalog by curator Colin Cruise
Merrill. 192 pages, $49.95
SIMEON SOLOMON, a gay, Jewish Pre-Raphaelite painter of the 19th century, has figured prominently in most studies of gay male painting, and there has been an upsurge in scholarly interest of late. However, it is still fair to say that his life story eclipses his artistic achievement. No wonder: in 1874, Solomon was among the first victims of a spate of high-profile prosecutions of gay men in London, convicted of “gross indecency.” Hence James Smalls, in Homosexuality in Art (2003), in comparing Solomon with Thomas Eakins and his English follower Henry Scott Tuke, writes: “The label ‘homosexual’ can be more assuredly applied to the most ‘out’ of 19th-century artists, Simeon Solomon.” For art historians interested in the representation of same-sex desire, Solomon’s transparency comes as welcome relief after the necessary circumspection concerning Eakins, Girodet, Flandrin—in fact, just about everyone after Caravaggio.
Solomon’s sentence of eighteen months’ imprisonment with light labor was later commuted to a six-week spell in a House of Correction and a £100 fine (a small fortune). Neither Solomon nor his career would recover from this moment of shame. High-profile supporters and friends such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the poet Algernon Swinburne snubbed him. Solomon survived thirty more long years, often destitute and homeless, wandering around London, usually with a bottle. He died in St Giles’s, among the toughest of the notorious Victorian workhouses.
His reputation showed some potential for recovery in the years following his death—notwithstanding the generally hostile climate in England toward any supposed pervert, in the wake of his friend Oscar Wilde’s fall in 1896. A major exhibition was held at London’s Baillie Gallery in 1906; two years later, one Julia Ellsworth Ford penned a substantial study of Solomon’s paintings. Instead of a revival, Solomon vanished for the next eighty years. His works still hung in provincial British galleries, however ignored. A few small-scale shows on symbolism and Pre-Raphaelitism featured him, but there has been no sizeable showing until Love Revealed.
In 1985, Simon Reynolds began the rescue of Solomon from oblivion with a monograph, The Vision of Simeon Solomon. In the 1990’s, writer and performance artist Neil Bartlett raised his name in theaters across the country through a fine performance piece, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (Bartlett appeared naked). This title was based upon Solomon’s homoerotic prose poem of the same name, but digressed to detail its subject’s tragic life story. The original poem—first privately printed in 1871—garnered a favorable view from Solomon’s friend Algernon Swinburne, who stressed the androgyny it shared with his paintings, with their “supersexual beauty in which the lineaments of woman and of man seem blended as the lines of sky and landscape melt in the burning mist of heat and light.”
And now a major exhibition celebrating Solomon’s work is touring Europe. Originating in industrial Birmingham, home to many of the artist’s most renowned works—though the city has no link to Solomon’s life—it opened in 2005, the centenary of his death. Unfortunately, it has not secured an American showing. Interested readers will have to make do with the excellent catalogue, edited by the show’s curator Colin Cruise: Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (2005).
Solomon’s verse reveals how, like many “fellow travelers” of the period, he was preoccupied by a strong sense of cultural estrangement or difference grounded in his sexual attraction toward young men. It tells us less, however, of the other “difference” that informed his work, especially as a young man: his Jewishness. Solomon set out to use models who were or appeared to be Semitic. His indulgent, languid æstheticization of their looks gives much of his œuvre “the indescribable perfume of Orientalism,” as John Addington Symonds put it. Of Solomon’s earliest paintings, which were invariably on biblical themes, one critic exclaimed that he “virtually invented a Jewish art in the 1850’s.” Such a focus was not rare so much as entirely unimagined in Europe.
Pronounced a genius at eighteen on the basis of his first show at the Royal Academy, Solomon was commissioned by the Dalziel brothers to design the sketches for their “Bible Gallery” of wooden engravings. Solomon became renowned for his proficient, accurate reproductions of traditional Jewish costume, artifacts, and ceremony, most evident in his Old Testament drawings and paintings of 1856–1863. He had been born into a solid, bourgeois Orthodox Jewish family of Italian extraction in London in 1840. Solomon’s father Michael was a craftsman who dedicated most of his working life to millinery and, later, to embossing paper doilies. Simeon’s brother Abraham—seventeen years his senior—was the more significant influence, having already embarked upon a career in genre painting by the time Simeon was born. His elder sister Rebecca also became an artist, studying under J. E. Millais.
The ambivalence with which mid-Victorian society considered Jewish self-identification in art corresponded to the complicated status of Jews in British society. They had undergone a gradual process of emancipation from the 1820’s to the 1860’s. For example, Solomon’s father was the first Jew to be allowed to practice in retail trade in the City of London. The first Jew in Parliament, Lionel de Rothschild, took his seat in 1858. This ambivalence may be measured in a range of press responses to the young Solomon’s work. A favorite subject was the young David playing music to King Saul. The reviewer for The London Times (May 24, 1859) opined concerning one such painting: “Mr. Solomon is of course a Jew, and it is satisfactory to note his marked national bent at a time when national bents in art are hardly traceable. If Mr. Solomon can conquer his besetting sins of ugliness, and if his nationalism be more than affectation, he may educate into a power a gift which at present produces little more than singularity.” This reviewer conceded of Saul that “we have no right to look for beauty in this Israelitish monarch possessed by his raging demon.”
Solomon’s take on biblical figures was consistently, startlingly odd. Jeremiah, conventionally shown as an old, bearded man, became in his 1862 canvas a sensitive adolescent receiving his calling. A similar key work, now known as Hosannah! (1861), received a warmer notice from the Times (May 12, 1861). The compliment was, however, revealingly backhanded, the association of Jewishness and unattractiveness reiterated: “We commend Mr. Solomon for his hearty nationality. He paints Jewish subjects, as a Jew should, with evident reverence and delight in recalling the mystery and greatness of the chosen people. This is a very impressive and noble figure, not marred by the ugliness in which Mr. Solomon has sometimes appeared to revel.”
Solomon was ambitious enough to broaden his repertoire beyond Judaic subjects. Throughout the 1860’s, as he moved away from home and family and befriended more Gentile painters, Solomon’s Jewishness became, in the words of Gayle Seymour, more of a “burden” than anything else. His work also moved toward the prominent style of the day, the Pre-Raphaelitism of Rossetti and Burne-Jones, though his interest in Classical landscape and legend set him apart.
What’s more, Solomon’s choice of Classical subjects proved typically idiosyncratic. An extraordinarily daring watercolor of 1866 reveals the embodiment of decadence, Roman Emperor Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun. Heliogabalus had declared himself man, woman, and sun-god, taking male as well as female lovers. Solomon shows him voluptuously dressed (perhaps as a woman), resting languidly on a plinth and holding an incense burner. When the painting was first displayed, The Art Journal pulled no punches in describing Solomon as contra naturam: “Solomon is a genius of eccentricity, he can do nothing like other people, and in being exclusively like himself, he becomes unlike to nature.” As for Solomon’s male bodies, they “would not be recognized by the College of Surgeons.”
Solomon dedicated a number of works to Sappho and her lovers, but he kept these private. Remarkably frank is one watercolor entitled Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene. Lesbianism had been notoriously celebrated in the verse of Baudelaire and his English champion Algernon Swinburne, whose poem “Anactoria” likewise paired Sappho and Erinna. But Solomon always had a taste for the tragedy inherent in homosexuality, as he and Victorian culture understood it. Thus he followed this celebratory work with a drawing, Erinna Taken from Sappho, in which Erinna embraces a male lover as the jealous, abandoned Sappho looks on.
An 1865 drawing on a non-Classical theme afforded a similar, and remarkable, triangular dramatization. In it, the act of marriage marks not so much the consummation of love as its abandonment: The Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love (1865) shows an idealized couple in a warm embrace—but the groom is also cupping the genitals of a figure of Cupid immediately behind him. Their fingers touch (as the couple’s conspicuously do not), though the androgynous boy’s gesture may be an attempt to pull the groom’s hand away from the proscribed region. In any case, Cupid—the third party—gazes out with ennui and resignation. Here, Solomon again drew on a biblical source in order to subvert it. John 3.29 reads: “He who has the bride is the bridegroom. The friend of the bridegroom, who stands and hears him, rejoices greatly at the bridegroom’s voice.” Solomon’s friend, Love himself, cannot rejoice.
One work of Solomon’s, Sacramentum Amoris, now known only through a photograph taken by his friend Frederick Hollyer, caused a scandal in 1868. Frederick Leyland, a key collector of Æsthetic art, had commissioned it but seems to have refused the strange result and to have broken with Solomon. The canvas must have been extraordinary. We see a man with a face of Venus-like, feminine beauty, covered in animal skins. He clutches at a monstrance and a thyrsus, which is a phallus-like giant fennel staff topped with a pinecone. The thyrsus, a fertility symbol, was associated especially with Bacchus. The conjunction here—doubtless intended by Solomon to convey the compatibility of Classical and Christian ideals—gains added subversiveness from the fact that in Classical representations Bacchus sometimes carried a thyrsus in one hand and a vagina-invoking wine-cup in the other. The wine-cup became the monstrance.
Another Bacchus, a watercolor of 1867, finds him either post-prandial or post-coital: pensive, meditative, subdued. The idealism of Classical statuary comes into collision with the naturalism that always characterized Solomon’s style, and which approaches that of Caravaggio. Swinburne identified Solo-mon’s innovation, or correction, with a sort of Jewish revisioning of Classical passions. Solomon’s designs, he wrote, “combine the fervent violence of feeling or faith which is peculiar to the Hebrews with the sensitive acuteness of desire, the sublime reserve and balance of passion, which is peculiar to the Greeks.” This picture may actually represent Hadrian’s lover Antinous, posing as Bacchus; Swinburne’s article refers to it as “the Sacrifice of Antinous,” drawing attention to the “mournful wonderful lips and eyes. … In these pictures some obscure suppressed tragedy of thought and passion and fate seems latent as the vital veins under a clear skin.”
Controversy had long attended the perceived sensuality of all the Pre-Raphaelites. One reviewer, Robert Buchanan, condemned the influence of Rossetti and Pre-Raphaelite values in art and poetry, calling it “nasty” and singling out Solomon’s “pretty pieces of morality” (ironically meant), full of “veritable monsters—like the lovely devils that danced around Saint Anthony.” Solomon’s softness of line, coupled with the preponderance of androgynous or effeminate young men, increasingly caused hostile comment. An apparently uncontroversial pencil sketch of 1870, The Singing of Love, shows four men and three women, representing Somnus, Memoria, Morpheus, Amor, Voluptas, Libido, and Mars. Still, it gleaned this stinging assessment from the Times (Feb. 11, 1871): it has “all the characteristic ‘notes’ of the painter—the uniformity of feature and expression in the heads, an unpleasant and unmanly suggestiveness in the choice of personifications and their attributes.”
Another painting, A Saint of the Eastern Church (1867–68), “too obviously lacks manliness to satisfy us, even in respect to Art,” declared The Athenæum (Feb. 1869), “yet it is very beautiful.” Love Dreaming by the Sea (1871) was particularly condemned by the same journal (Feb. 3, 1872) for its lack of “manliness”: the “young person, of uncertain sex” was an “emasculated personage … neither articulated nor even moderately well proportioned; notice the poor little feet and the ‘dandy’s legs.’” Did the reviewer notice, but choose not to mention, the fact that the figure sports an erect nipple? Two sketches, Love amongst the Schoolboys and Eton Schoolboys, border on the pornographic. In the latter, a winged figure of Love instructs a set of boys, several embracing, in his ways. (Robert Browning was one of several schoolmasters dismissed in the 1870’s for close friendships with pupils.)
After Solomon’s own arrest in 1873 while cruising a London urinal, he continued to paint and draw prodigiously. Swinburne notably grew quiet on the subject of his painting. Only Walter Pater, in an 1876 essay on Bacchus, mentioned Solomon favorably, especially an oil painting of Bacchus now in the Birmingham collections. Pater stressed again the modernity of the painter’s vision, which captured “the god of the bitterness of wine, ‘of things too sweet’; the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup.”
The current exhibition allows con-siderable space for Solomon’s rather despairing late works. Androgynous Medusa-types moon out at us; disembodied heads, resembling those of Odilon Redon, orbit aimlessly—as, apparently, did Solomon himself. James Smalls notes that these representations consolidate the artist’s lifelong taste for the tragic, arguing that Solomon “work[ed]tirelessly at publicly projecting himself as the eternally suffering artist” (Homosexuality in Art). In 1887, the critic Arthur Symons privately described Solomon as a “shipwreck of a genius.” If his late works lack the finish or impact of those of his greatest fame, they nevertheless point to an admirable tenacity in Solomon. He lived and died an artist, whatever happened to his reputation. They also indicate how, even lacking patrons and a public, this all-too-vital gay artist, a true innovator, never lost his vitality.
Gay artists today may imagine and anticipate an audience for work with a homoerotic aspect. Artists of the mid- to late-Victorian age such as Simeon Solomon dared to fantasize that such an audience might exist, as they believed it had in antiquity. In these fantasies, they began the artistic process of bringing a receptive audience into being, even as this led them into real and personal conflict with the mores of the day.
Note: All quotes are from Love Revealed unless otherwise indicated.
Richard Canning, who lives in London, is the author of Gay Fiction Speaks (Columbia, 2001) and Hear Us Out (Columbia, 2004) and editor of the forthcoming Between Men: New Gay Fiction (Carroll & Graf).
