Simeon Solomon, born on October 9, 1840 in London, was the eighth child of Michael Solomon and Catherine Levy. His father, a prosperous merchant dealing in Leghorn hats and among the first Jews to be named a freeman, died when Simeon was still a teenager. Despite persistent anti-Semitic stereotypes, Victorian society slowly became more accepting of Jewish civic and cultural contributions. In 1858, Lionel de Rothschild became the first Jew to take a seat in the House of Commons. That same year, at just eighteen, Solomon achieved his own milestone as the youngest artist to exhibit at the Royal Academy.

During the 1860s, Solomon emerged as the youngest member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the influential circle of painters and poets formed in 1848 as a challenge to the Royal Academy’s academic conventions. As the last new member to join the Pre-Raphaelites, Edward Burne-Jones described Solomon as “the greatest artist of us all.”[1] Solomon’s symbolists works resonated with the movement’s ideals, evens as his Jewishness marked him somewhat of an outsider.

On February 11, 1873, Solomon’s life took a tragic turn. Arrested for indecent exposure in a public lavatory, he was sentenced to six weeks in the Clerkenwell House of Correction, fined, and placed under police supervision. The scandal swiftly severed his ties with the Pre-Raphaelites and broader art establishment. A second arrest in Paris led to another prison term. Ostracized, Solomon descended into poverty, battling homelessness and alcoholism. After fifteen years of fame, his career ended as abruptly as it began. He died of heart failure on August 14, 1905, in the St. Giles parish workhouse.

Aligned with a broader Victorian trend, the Pre-Raphaelites’ embrace of androgynous models resonated with Solomon’s queer identity. Within Jewish mysticism, the Kabbalistic idea of Adam as a unified male-female being may have offered spiritual solace, reconciling his own sense of self. Although homosexual identity began to emerge in the 1870s, it remained stigmatized and legally perilous in Victorian society.

Despite decades of destitute and without access to a studio, Solomon remained remarkably prolific. Although his following had dwindled, Solomon seemed to have access to a variety of art supplies and showed no slowing down. The present Sleep seems to be far more than a preparatory study for Solomon’s slightly larger painting The Moon and The Sleep, now in the Tate. If the subject of our red chalk drawing was ambiguous, using the same androgynous model, the painting reveals the story of the love of moon goddess Selene for the mortal shepherd Endymion, the youth granted eternal sleep.

According to Greek mythology, goddess Selene, or Luna, asked her cousin Zeus to grant the handsome Endymion eternal youth achieved by an unending sleep. Captivated by his beauty, her normally cold heart was so enthralled, that she descended from the sky each night to visit her eternally sleeping beauty. Night after night she kissed him and according to the myth, had fifty daughters by him.

Please note that this work is the subject of a loan request for an exhibition dedicated to the artist, to be held at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington in the spring of 2027.