Simeon Solomon (1840-1905)
Provenance
J. R. Lamantia
Exhibitions
Durlacher Bros., Madison Avenue and Wellesley College, 'Simeon Solomon Exhibition', April & May 1966, no 19
Literature
Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings by Simeon Solomon, Durlacher Bros., April 1966, no 19
This drawing dates from the year Solomon died, of bronchitis and alchoholism, in August 1905, making this one of his last known drawings. The subject may relate to Solomon's prose poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871), wherein the narrator is guided by his soul through a dreamscape and encounters visions of Love - 'forsaken and shamed, wounded and forgotten; of guileless and soulless pleasure in its naked and melodious maidenhood [...] of death and silence, and of sleep and time'. (Swinburne's review, The Dark Blue, 1871) Though varied, every manifestation of Love took male form, winged, with a radiance, or glow about the head. Despite Victorian strictures, its displacement of homosexual love to the shadowy borders of nocturnal London, Solomon created a condition for poetic and artistic refuge: the veil of night.