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 destitution and the absence of a proper studio, Solomon remained remarkably prolific. Even as his circle of supporters diminished, he somehow maintained access to a range of art supplies and showed no signs of slowing down. Although not uncommon in his later practice, the use of three different colored chalks echoes the three stages of life. Nearing fifty, Solomon may have well been contemplating his own trajectory, though it is more likely that he drew on the Talmudic tripartite division of existence: boyhood, adulthood, and old age.

[1] Alfred Werner, “The Sad Ballad of Simeon Solomon”, The Kenyon Review, Vol. XXII, No. 3, Summer 1960, p. 398