Simeon Solomon: Painting Queerness and Judaism in Victorian England

Early Life

Simeon Solomon was born in London in 1840 in the midst of the struggle for Jewish emancipation. Jews had been granted permission to practice retail trade just nine years earlier. It’d be another 18 years before the Jewish Relief Act removed the need for elected officials to take a Christian oath.

The Solomon family lived in Bishopsgate, a neighborhood straddling two worlds. One side of the neighborhood abutted the interior of London. The other side bordered the squalid crowding of East London as depicted in Dickens’s Oliver Twist. The Solomons achieved middle-class status on the brink of the mass migration of impoverished Jews to the East End that occurred in the final decades of the century.

Simeon Solomon was the youngest of eight siblings. His brother Abraham, 17 years his senior, was admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts the year before Simeon was born. The same institution, while happy to show Simeon’s older sister Rebecca’s paintings in summer exhibitions, would not admit her, or any other woman, as a student.

Solomon earned admission to the Royal Academy at just 16, and within two years, he became one of the youngest artists to exhibit at the Academy. He has been called a prodigy, yet his early success may have had more to do with skilled mentoring than innate ability.

During Simeon Solomon’s childhood, Rebecca and Abraham were already established artists and provided him with support and instruction. From a young age, Simeon was probably working in his brother’s studio and hearing stories from his sister about her job as an assistant to John Everett Millais. Already, Simeon was entrenched in the Pre-Raphaelite movement, an aesthetic characterized by the influence of classic literature, admiration of nature, bright colors, and attention to pattern and detail.

Pre-Raphaelite Artist

As a Jew, Simeon found an entryway into the world of Pre-Raphaelite painting through the Old Testament. The Mother of Moses was shown at the Royal Academy when Solomon was just 19. While praised by many critics, others took issue with the painting’s central figures, particularly their dark skin color. Fanny Eaton, a Jamaican-born Black woman, had served as Solomon’s sitter. Afterward, many other Pre-Raphaelites employed her as a model as well.

A Young Musician Employed in the Temple Service During the Feast of Tabernacles shows a celebration of Sukkot, a Jewish holiday commemorating the Exodus from Egypt and the fall harvest.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace comes from the Book of Daniel. Three Jewish men are sentenced to burn for failing to show subservience to the king, yet are miraculously unscathed by the flames. This painting also shows another grand theme of Solomon’s: a celebration of queerness.

Blurring Gender

From its beginning in 1848, the Pre-Raphaelite movement played with traditional depictions of gender. The original seven-member Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood included artists William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Women became active figures with postures and expressions that created female-driven narratives. Strong noses and accentuated cheekbones sometimes gave female subjects a more masculine appearance.

Artists inspired by the original Brotherhood pushed further. Sometimes male bodies became nearly indistinguishable from female bodies. Edward Burne-Jones, a friend and contemporary of both Rebecca and Simeon Solomon, was often criticized for the effeminate portrayal of the men in his paintings. This Pre-Raphaelite blurring of gender was extended to a pinnacle by Symbolist artists like Gustav Klimt and Aubrey Beardsley.

Queer Themes

Simeon Solomon’s work played not only with androgyny and gender expression, but also with sexuality. Often, his scenes lurk in innuendo, a subtle homoerotic gaze or a posturing of figures inviting questions. Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene, however, clearly shows a homosexual romance. Sappho, the Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, shown in yellow, is the origin of the modern word lesbian.

The Sleepers and the One that Watcheth (above) shows three androgynous figures in a dreamy, romantic embrace. Several Solomon drawings and illustrations show homoerotic subtext during marriage ceremonies. In his drawing Illustration to the Song of Solomon, the bride appears to be the odd one out as the groom and another man share affections.

Bohemian Social Scene

Abraham Solomon, who lived the most conventional life of the three artist siblings, died abruptly in 1862. No doubt his death profoundly impacted Rebecca and Simeon. Rebecca, who had previously worked closely with Abraham, began sharing studio space with Simeon. They promoted and supported each other as artists. Many believe it was the more devout Rebecca who influenced Simeon’s depictions of traditional Jewish stories and themes.

Simeon and Rebecca also enjoyed a vibrant social life that included intellectuals like Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and the controversial poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, who became a close friend of Simeon.

Swinburne’s 1866 book Poems and Ballads included two poems, Hermaphroditus and Sapphics, that exploded conventional ideas about sexuality and a gender binary. Off the page, Swinburne’s sexuality was varied and diverse. He was a known masochist, and Simeon illustrated his unpublished book The Flogging Block. Swinburne also contributed to The Whippingham Papers, a collection of erotic prose and poetry published in 1887.

A story survives of Swinburne sliding naked down a banister with a male friend while boarding with Rossetti, much to the chagrin of another boarder, the novelist George Meredith. While there is no conclusive evidence of Swinburne’s homosexuality or bisexuality, there remain many historical hints, his friendship with Solomon being one.

Arrest and Downfall

While fluid ideas about gender and sexuality may have fit within sexual practices and intellectual ideas of Simeon Solomon’s Pre-Raphaelite social set, they put him far outside the social norms of Victorian England. In 1873, Solomon was caught with stablehand George Roberts and convicted of attempted “buggery,” a serious offense. Just 12 years earlier, sodomy had been punishable by death.

Roberts served 18 months of hard labor. Solomon, on the other hand, was fined and released to his cousin. Afterward, he spent time in two different lunatic asylums before being caught and arrested again with a male sex worker in Paris.

This proved the end of Simeon Solomon’s artistic relevance. His friends in the art world largely abandoned him. Public commissions were off the table, and private commissions dried up as well. Even the eccentric Swinburne turned against Solomon, calling him “a thing unmentionable alike by men or women, as equally abhorrent to either—nay, to the very beasts.”

Alcohol and poverty were Solomon’s constant companions for the rest of his life, and while he continued to produce great art, he could never restore his reputation. In his book A Hundred Years of British Painting published in 1951, Hesketh Hubbard wrote, “The story of Solomon’s remaining 33 years, of what is known of them, as unsuccessful pavement artist and shadowy vagrant, is too tragic for this chronicle.” Solomon died in 1905.

Legacy

Today, scholars and museums recognize Simeon Solomon as an important artist of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. In 2017, Tate Britain included his work in Queer British Art 1861–1967. In 2027, the Delaware Art Museum will show 180 of his works. Solomon’s artistry holds up, and his brazen depictions of Jewishness and homosexuality in the restrictive Victorian society are now valued as courageous subversion rather than scandalous.