"He hath Mingled with the Ungodly": The Life of Simeon Solomon after 1873 with a survey of the extant works
(University of York: 2010)
Simeon Solomon by Frederick Hollyer
copyright Victoria & Albert Museum
PhD Thesis At the height of his artistic fame, the Jewish, homosexual, Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic artist Simeon Solomon was arrested on the 11th February 1873 for attempted sodomy. He was arrested with George Roberts, a sixty year old stableman, in a public urinal by police constable William Mitchell, around the corner from Marylebone Lane Police Station, in Stratford Place Mews, off Oxford Street. On the following day both men were read the charge “that they did unlawfully attempt feloniously to commit the abominable crime of buggery”. Subsequently, Solomon was fortunate enough to escape a custodial prison sentence but was required to pay a surety of £100 on condition that he returned to court if necessary. This verdict essentially allowed Solomon to walk legally free from the court. The unfortunate Roberts was, however, sentenced to eighteen months hard labour in the House of Correction at Cold Bath Fields.
It has always remained unclear what happened to Solomon during and after his arrest for attempted buggery in 1873. To date scholars have only been able to speculate about his whereabouts and activities during the remaining thirty-two years of his life, relying primarily on information published by a series of unreliable writers such as Robert Ross, at the turn of the century, Julia Ellsworth Ford in 1908 and the sensationalist tabloid news journalist Bernard Falk in 1937. Indeed, all three writers claimed to have met Solomon towards the end of his life, and tales of the artist’s “descent into the abyss” abound, as a “professional mendicant” amongst the “dregs of humanity,” and as a man “avoided by all who knew him”.
Despite the more recent research into Solomon’s life by scholars such as Lionel Lambourne, Simon Reynolds and Gayle Seymour, little biographical information has come to light to date concerning the later years of Solomon’s life. However, what is clear is that Solomon was unable to return to the artistic life he had led before the arrest, in the esteemed company of Rossetti and Burne-Jones. It is also known that he spent much of his later life living in and out of St Giles workhouse in central London where he subsequently died of heart failure in 1905. In spite of this it is clear that he continued to create hundreds of pieces of work during this thirty-two year period, many of which where reproduced as platinotype copies by the photographer Frederic Hollyer.
My research into Solomon’s life after 1873 is based on primary archival sources. The documents that I am researching, for the first time, reveal some of the hitherto undisclosed detail of Solomon’s life after 1873, which, I think will be valuable for scholars working in fields such as the history of sexuality and gender, queer studies, and British social history as well as the history of art.
Simeon Solomon, Nirvana, 1895
Further Reading
Ferrari, R. C. 'To the Rossetti's, from the Solomons: Five Unpublished Letters', Notes and Queries 52, no. 1 (2005), 70-75.
Ferrari, R. C. 'Selected Letters of Simeon Solomon', The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (2003) 23- 34.
Ford, Ellsworth, J. Simeon Solomon: An Appreciation (New York, 1908).
Lambourne, L. 'The Solomon Family', in Inner London Education Authority, (ed.). Solomon, a Family of Painters: Abraham Solomon (1823-1862), Rebecca Solomon (1832-1886), Simeon Solomon (1840-1905).
Lambourne, L. 'Abraham Solomon, Painter of Fashion and Simeon Solomon Decadent Artist',Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 21 (1968), 59-61.(1840-1905) (London, 1985c), 6-7.
Lambourne, L. 'A Simeon Solomon Sketchbook', Apollo 85 (1967), 59-61.
Reynolds, S. The Vision of Simeon Solomon (Stroud, 1985).
Seymour, G. M. 'The Life and Work of Simeon Solomon (1840-1905)' PhD, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, 1986.
Simeon Solomon, Night and Sleep, 1894
Brief biography of Simeon Solomon
Simeon Solomon was born on the 9th October 1840 into the prosperous Jewish Solomon family; the youngest child of Michael (also known as Meyer) Solomon and Catherine (Kate) Levy. The Solomons already had seven other children by the time Solomon was born at 3 Sandy’s Street, Bishopsgate Without in the City of London. The lives of five of his siblings; Aaron, Betsy, Isaac, Ellen, and Sylvester are relatively unknown, however his brother Abraham (1823-62) and sister Rebecca (1832-1836) were also painters and familiar to Victorian society, particularly for their genre paintings. It appears that the three artistic Solomon children may have acquired their talent from their mother Kate who was an amateur artist and an enthusiastic extoller of the visual arts.
The Solomons were an orthodox Jewish family and Solomon’s father Michael was a respected member of the London Jewish community and only the second Jew to be afforded the Freedom of the City. Around the time of Solomon’s birth his father Michael and his uncle Abraham, resurrected his grandfather Aaron’s ailing business of manufacturing Leghorn hats, which was registered at the family home in Sandy’s Street. They reinvested a substantial sum of money in the family business and upon purchasing new premises began embossing paper doilies and other paper goods.
The Solomons’ wealth gave them the ability to send their three artistic children to prestigious private schools of art in London. Abraham was thirteen when he was sent to Henry Sass’s Bloomsbury establishment. His early painting talent can be vividly evidenced in his portrayal of Solomon as a baby produced when he was only seventeen years old. In 1839, after leaving Sass’s school he studied at the Royal Academy and went on principally to produce narrative paintings of fashionable scenes from contemporary Victorian life, which were popular enough to provide him with a substantial income.
In 1854, he took on an important role as a surrogate father for Solomon, when Michael Solomon died of heart failure aggravated by bronchitis. He proceeded to guide his younger brother’s artistic career by enrolling him in his old academy, now known as Cary’s, and Abraham’s tutelage of the young Solomon is mentioned in Williamson’s biography of Marks. He wrote that by the age of ten Solomon was training in his brother’s studio at 18 Gower Street and “quickly making his presence felt and developing wonderful skill and an astonishing accuracy, and painstaking manner, very much on Pre-Raphaelite lines.
Solomon’s remarkably precocious talent for drawing and the evident influence that the Pre-Raphaelites’ medieval imagery and style of representation had on his imagination can be seen in a sketchbook of his early childhood drawings now held at the Ein Harod Museum in Israel. Solomon’s early work was also influenced by his sister Rebecca who he appears to have been particularly close to throughout his early life.
Rebecca’s influence is very much evident in Solomon’s choice of Hebraic themes in his formative years which William Michael Rossetti, recalled as “exceedingly clever and full of varied picturesque faculty”.
In later years, Rebecca and Solomon appear to have adopted a mutual dependence when Abraham died suddenly at the age of forty-one in Biarritz, France after only a year of marriage to his wife Ella Hart.
In 1855, at the age of fifteen, Solomon entered the Royal Academy School and his life at this time is recorded in the memoirs of the painter Henry Holiday. Holiday and fellow student, Marcus Stone, developed a warm and “valuable friendship” with Solomon that lasted twenty years.
In 1858 he exhibited his first piece of work at the Royal Academy, a drawing titled Isaac Offered. The Athenaeum praised Solomon’s work and described him as a “promising young artist”.
Also in 1858 Solomon began an acquaintance with his paragon Dante Gabriel Rossetti who would introduce him to other members of the Pre-Raphaelites and their wider artistic circle and from here his life and work would take a different direction.
Solomon continued to exhibit successfully at the Royal Academy and Gambart’s French Gallery, and his artistic output in the early 1860s was prolific. His early close relationship with the Pre-Raphaelites is attested in the inclusion of his facial features in Rossetti’s stained glass window design for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Co.
The young artist seems to have naturally gravitated towards the artistic clique that Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites belonged to.
The poet Algernon Swinburne had probably been introduced to Solomon as early as 1859, when both men were members of the 38th Middlesex Rifle Volunteer Corps (Artists), which had been formed at Burlington House, and consisted of professional painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, and actors. Swinburne was to become a major stimulus to Solomon through his Decadent poetry and lifestyle. However, in scholarly retrospect Swinburne’s friendship with Solomon has always been considered the most damaging of all his relationships and Solomon’s moral character has been described as weak and easily influenced.
It cannot be denied, however, that the Aesthetic ideals of Rossetti’s circle during the early 1860s had a major influence on Solomon’s life and work. The iconography of sexual ambiguity, so prevalent in Pre-Raphaelite work, becomes highly visible in Solomon’s paintings and his choice of Old Testament themes begins to be replaced by the Classical subjects preferred by Swinburne.
Solomon’s work began to demonstrate a new awareness of sexuality that was stimulated by his friendship with Swinburne and apparent in the extant written correspondence between the two. These letters give an insight into their shared interest in the erotic writings of the Marquis de Sade and Swinburne’s interest in the sexual possibilities of flagellation.
In the following few years before his conviction, Solomon produced work that was actively criticised for its ‘decadent’ portrayal of figures. In 1869 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine thought that it was a pity that the artist should emulate this style, and a year later the Art Journal was worried about his “monotone of sentiment” which did not “provoke merriment” and suggested that he needed a “tonic” or “possibly even a course of bitters” to cure this affliction. These articles were the precursor of a more vicious attack from the art critic Robert Buchanan in 1871 who overtly suggested that “English society of another kind goes into ecstasy over Mr. Solomon’s pictures- pretty pieces of morality such as ‘Love dying by the breath of Lust’” and that he lent “actual genius to worthless subjects” which “thereby produce veritable monsters”.
Despite this awareness, Solomon was prepared to continue producing images that would be damaging to his career and reputation.
In 1873 he was arrested for attempted sodomy in a London urinal.
Simeon Solomon, Angel of Death, 1896
Simeon Solomon, Sleep, 1893