Welcome to the Simeon Solomon Research Archive, a repository of information by and about the Victorian artist Simeon Solomon and his artist siblings Rebecca Solomon and Abraham Solomon.
Researched and edited by Carolyn Conroy and Roberto C. Ferrari © 2012
IMPORTANT: Please note that we no longer own the old Simeon Solomon Research Archive URL www.simeonsolomon.org ; however, the original content of the site appears to have been hijacked and is being used without our permission. We have asked the current owner of simeonsolomon.org to remove our copyrighted work.
This site is the ONLY genuine Simeon Solomon Research Archive on the web.
The purpose of this website is to encourage research on the work of Simeon Solomon, who until recently was still an obscure artist known only to those interested in Pre-Raphaelitism. Over the past twenty-five years increased interest in the Pre-Raphaelites and Aesthetes, Judaic Studies, and Gender/Gay/Queer Studies has generated a resurgence of information on Solomon and his work. It seems that more criticism has been published about him in the past twenty years than had been published in the fifty years prior.
Simeon Solomon was born in 1840 into a prosperous Jewish family in the City of London. He was the youngest of eight children, of whom eldest brother Abraham and sister Rebecca were also artists. Solomon would become the most famous of his artistic siblings, befriending and working alongside Pre-Raphaelites Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones, fraternising with poet Algernon Swinburne, and exhibiting at the Royal Academy and Dudley Gallery in London. His wealthy patrons included Lord Battersea, Eleanor Tong Coltart, and James Leathart. However, in 1873, at the height of his artistic fame, Solomon was arrested and convicted of attempted sodomy in a public urinal off Oxford Street in London. This arrest effectively brought an end to Solomon’s public career; however, he continued to produce a large body of work until his death in 1905. The last thirty-three years of his life were undoubtedly affected by an addiction to alcohol, which is more than likely responsible for the erratic state of his life, which appears to have been lived both in and out of poverty. Despite this, Solomon's work and perceived bohemian lifestyle was admired by Rhymers’ Club poets Lionel Johnson and Ernest Dowson, and was he was befriended by the eccentric poet and Baltic/German aristocrat Count Stenbock. Solomon died at St Giles’s Workhouse in Bloomsbury in 1905.
This site is a continuous work in progress. Last update 06 January 2012.
LATEST SSRA NEWS: Sept 2011: A co-authored, two-part article by Roberto C. Ferrari and Carolyn Conroy about Simeon Solomon's life and work has just been published in the Sept/Oct 2011 issue of the Gay and Lesbian Review. Click here.
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