The Destruction of Solomon (2011)
Twenty-two years before the cause celebre of Oscar Wilde’s trial, another homosexual scandal emerged in the art world. This time, the fame of the ‘culprit’ was not as great, and his ‘crime’ did not directly impinge upon the ruling class. However, the effects of his conviction and punishment were the same: destitution, ignominy and a complete crushing of his artistic career. He ended his days alternating between living rough on the streets of Whitechapel, where he occasionally eked out a living as a pavement artist, and the St Giles workhouse, when his alcoholism precluded even this small dignity.
At ten past seven on the evening of February 11, 1873, two men were arrested while having sex in the men's public lavatory on St Christopher’s Place, just round the back of Oxford Street. In the London of the time…such arrests were not unusual, but this one featured a highly unusual combination of culprits. One of them was an illiterate, 60-year-old stableman (Mr George Roberts), while the other was the 33-year-old youngest son of a respectable East End Jewish family, a rising star of the London art scene. (Neil Bartlett, ‘Fallen Angel’, The Guardian, October 8, 2005)
The younger man was the painter Simeon Solomon. He was born in the East End of London in 1840, the last of eight children in an artistic, prosperous middle-class Jewish family. In 1856, at the age of sixteen, he was accepted into the Royal Academy Schools. He had been proposed by the painter Augustus Egg. This was the standard age for entry into the schools. However, John Everett Millais, the most technically brilliant of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and a child prodigy, gained entry at the unprecedented age of eleven, due to his remarkable drawing ability.
Lionised by such luminaries as Rossetti, Burne-Jones and Walter Pater, Solomon quickly established himself as a fashionable painter, engraver and watercolourist. For a while, he mixed in the most exalted of artistic circles and his star was set to rise very high indeed. He greatly admired the work of Edward Burne-Jones, in whose androgynous figures he saw a parallel with his own. He was friends with the decadent poet Swinburne, who was older by three years. Swinburne’s poetry was suffused with sadomasochism, lesbianism and a longing for death. For a time he kept a pet monkey and a rumour arose (probably started by Swinburne himself) that he had trained the animal to masturbate him. When he was twenty-seven, it is claimed that he had eaten roast monkey with the then fourteen-year-old Guy de Maupassant: whether it was the same unfortunate animal is not clear. Whilst it has been sometimes suggested that Solomon was seduced into debauchery by the slightly older man, there is ample evidence to show that Solomon had been interested in ‘morbid’ themes in his own poetry and paintings before he and Swinburne ever met. Perhaps it is more correct to suggest that the pair were kindred spirits who were inevitably drawn together by their respective ‘differences’. For all Solomon’s desire to be included within the canon of Pre-Raphaelitism, it is the contemporaneous French decadents with whom he had closest affinity. His contemporary, the artist Charles Ricketts, wrote in his journals that Solomon practiced 'blackguardism by preference' (Self-Portrait: Taken from the Letters & Journals of Charles Ricketts, R.A., (1939) edited by T. Sturge Moore and Cecil Lewis). But, then, Ricketts had a vested interest in taking a distanced stance from the actions of Solomon, as his own life-long homosexual relationship with the artist Charles Shannon was a closely guarded secret.
In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in Solomon’s work and an attempt to elevate him in status as a major but long-neglected British artist. He has become something of a gay poster-boy for his daring outré behaviour. In the late-'80s, British playwright, and occasional gay-activist, Neil Bartlett wrote his monologue on Solomon, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep. It was performed in the nude.
In 2005, the first major exhibition of his work, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, was staged at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The aim of the exhibition was to reposition Solomon as a leading exponent of late Pre-Raphaelite art and to make a claim for his importance in British art. As the introduction to the catalogue informs us,
one of the most remarkable features of Solomon’s career was how often the word ‘genius’ was used to describe him. For his admirers – and even for his many critics – his works were evidence of prodigious talent elevated, to a greater or lesser degree, by this rare quality. (Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, eds. Colin Cruise and Victoria Osborne, Merrell, 2005, p.11)
Simeon Solomon, Self Portrait in the Pre-Raphaelite Manner,
and Self Portrait, both from 1860.
One may indeed marvel at the word ‘genius’, because this large body of work, collected together for the first time, revealed that in fact Solomon’s output was patchy in quality. Sometimes, it is extremely good, as in the pencil self portraits, which show great attention to detail and likeness: in these beautiful drawings we can see a resemblance to a photograph of Solomon taken by Frederick Hollyer some years later, and there is a sense that Solomon has striven to capture all the details and nuances of himself as a young artist. In the self-consciously Pre-Raphaelite self portrait, Solomon has portrayed himself as medieval princeling, complete with sensitive downcast gaze and luxuriantly bouffant coiffure. Elsewhere, however, his output is marred by indifferent, even scruffy, drawing; eyes are sometimes mismatched, for instance, or he is inattentive to the proportions of the body; some works are marred by an unsure, over-tentative application of the chalk or pastel. This unevenness may certainly be ascribed to his later decent into alcoholism and drug addiction, but Solomon also seems to have had a cavalier attitude to his own talent and abilities throughout his career and even some of his earlier works suffer from a sometimes lackadaisical approach.
To the late-Victorian world, Solomon presented what we would perhaps today call a camp persona, which undoubtedly had its origins in his observations of the male members of the Aesthetic movement, but which he intensified and personalised to a marked degree. He was flamboyant in demeanour and given to archly camp remarks; on a trip to Rhaiadr-y-Wennol in North Wales for instance, he stood at the picturesque rapids and cascading falls and said, ‘I suppose they turn this off at night.’ (Quoted in Ronald Pearsall's The Worm in the Bud, Penguin, 1989, p.550)
A journalist once interviewed the destitute artist in the St Giles workhouse and asked how he felt to be living there? Solomon replied that he liked it immensely because it was ‘so central’.
Throughout his professional life, Solomon disported himself recklessly in public and completely disregarded the strict heterocentric tenets of his times: in 1871, for instance, he not only attended the trial of the gay transvestites Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, but he had tea with them afterwards, following their acquittal. (Boulton and Park were known to each other, and the various men they picked up, as Stella and Fanny. They were arrested at the Strand Theatre, in 1871, for importuning, and committed for trial. This proved inconclusive and they were acquitted).
It is here timely to recall that it was only in 1861, a mere ten years before this trial, that the death sentence for buggery had been abolished. There followed a ‘spectacular growth of Victorian middle-class puritanism’:
A powerful religious revival, laying stress on such things as the sanctity of family life, the virtues of conventional behaviour, the repression of sins of the flesh, even the upholding of Britain’s imperial mission, created a climate increasingly hostile to all manifestations of sexual and social unorthodoxy, especially [my italics] homosexuality. (Aronson, Theo, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld, John Murray, 1996, p. 13.)
As it was, Boulton and Park stood to
receive a sentence of hard labour from between ten years to life, so Solomon’s public
support of the two men can be seen to have been both brave and completely reckless.
To a large degree, in the early stages of his career, Solomon was immune from
censure because he moved in bohemian circles; indeed, even the resolutely
heterosexual Rossetti hardly batted an eyelid when Solomon and Swinburne
cavorted naked and shrieking around his house in Cheyne Walk, only complaining
when it became difficult to work because of the din they were making. (Cooper, Emmanuel, The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and
Art in the Last 100 Years in the West, Routledge, 1994, p. 66)
Eventually, however, even in the rarefied strata of London bohemia, Solomon eventually came to be
viewed as beyond the pale: a pariah. At the end of his trial he was fined
one-hundred pounds and ordered to submit to police supervision. His partner in
the nocturnal adventure, the elderly, working-class George Roberts, who had no
powerful friends to help him, fared less well and was sentenced to eighteen
months' hard labour. Almost immediately Solomon’s friends and supporters
dropped him. Even Swinburne distanced himself, sending letters to mutual
friends castigating Solomon.
In an
essay about the artist from 1905, the same year as Solomon’s death, Robert Ross
writes that ‘he enjoyed his drink, his overpowering dirt and his vicious life.
He was full of delightful and racy stories about poets and painters, policemen
and prisons, of which he had wide experience.’ (Ross, Robert, ‘Simeon
Solomon’, collected in Masques and Phases,
BiblioBazaar, 2007, p. 86.).
Ross goes on to relate the story of Solomon calling on an artist friend (it is
now generally assumed to have been Burne-Jones) to ask for money, which was
duly given to him. Later the same evening, Solomon returned to the house with
an acquaintance; they broke in with the intention of stealing the silverware.
Ross says that by the late 1800s Solomon had ceased to produce work of any
artistic merit whatsoever, and that he ‘poured out a quantity of pastels at a
guinea a piece’ which were ‘repulsive and ill-drawn, with the added horror of
being the shadows of once splendid achievements’.
The negativity directed towards Solomon does not end with the moral arbiters of his own period; in Ronald Pearsall’s study of Victorian sexuality, The Worm in the Bud, originally published in 1969, Solomon is described as ‘that most raffish of Victorian perverts’, and Timothy Hilton, in Pre-Raphaelites (1970), calls him ‘dissipated’ and describes his work as having ‘an unwholesome and sexy gloom’. (Hilton, Timothy, Pre-Raphaelites, Thames & Hudson, London, 1970, p. 202) One supposes that, had Solomon manifested a ‘wholesome’ heterosexual robustness, he would have been afforded a much different appraisal.
Always a heavy drinker, he specialised in dressing up in vaguely eastern robes and flaunting his equally flowing red hair - this at a time when to risk appearing either too Jewish or too effeminate was considered unwise even at the most advanced of art world parties, and to be both at the same time, unheard-of. (Bartlett)
Photograph of Simeon Solomon in Oriental robes and turban by David Wilkie Wynfield, c.1870
Simeon Solomon, Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup, 1859, pen and ink
In 1859, Solomon drew Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup for a group exhibition of work based upon bible stories: it was refused, and one can only imagine the concern of the Dalziel brothers, who had organised the exhibition, on first seeing it. Ostensibly, the work refers to a passage in Jeremiah about the enslavement of the Jewish people in the kingdom of Babylon; the reclining figure is the elderly and bedridden ‘King David’ and the figure behind him is his maidservant Abishag who, according to the biblical story, was supposed to lie with the elderly king to keep him warm with her body. However, Solomon’s transformed image is decidedly sexually charged and highly ambiguous. Against a pale backdrop featuring half-naked dancing girls, the king leans back into the naked body of the servant; their faces are turned towards each other, only separated by a breath. That the servant appears to be, even after long and careful scrutiny, a young man, is undeniable; the fact that he reaches over the king’s shoulders and gracefully plucks the harp that is propped on his lap, while the old man swoons with pleasure, is provocatively homoerotic; to complete the picture, curled up just below the dais supporting the two figures, like an overgrown pussycat, is a drowsing panther; perhaps an ancestor of one of those that feasted with Oscar Wilde. It was with the dawn of the new decade, shortly after this watercolour was made, that Solomon sought more classical themes:
It was [during the 1860s] that homosexuality blossomed in both his art and life. He began to explore Greco-Roman images with homoerotic themes. (Ferrari, Roberto C. ‘From Sodomite to Queer Icon: Simeon Solomon and the Evolution of Gay Studies’, in Art Documentation, Spring 2001, Vol. 20 No. 1, p. 11)
Solomon was doubly stigmatised: first, by his Jewishness, which was seen as an exotic feature in his work and in his appearance, and second, by his homosexuality, which he made absolutely no attempt to disguise. That he chose to make a virtue of both is testament to his courage, even if this veered into foolhardiness on countless occasions. John Addington Symonds, writing about Solomon’s drowsily erotic poem ‘A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep’ (1871), which was loosely based on The Song of Solomon, stated that:
Mr Solomon's Love is not classical,
not medieval, not Oriental; but it has a touch of all these qualities - the
pure perfection of the classic form, the allegorical mysticism and pensive
grace of the middle age, and the indescribable perfume of Orientalism ... Added
to these general qualities we trace in this spirit of love a vague yet intense
yearning; a ‘Sehnsucht’, which belongs to music and is essentially modern. (Symonds, John Addington.
‘Solomon's A Vision of Love and other
studies’, pp. 189-90. Academy, 21, 2, 1st April 1871)
The
‘essentially modern’, ethereal longing that the Symonds speaks of is homosexual
and it is pertinent that he draws a parallel with Orientalism and its
‘indescribable perfume’; it was indescribable because it was still the love
that dared not speak its name. In a letter to Swinburne, Solomon revealed that
he was aware that his work was ‘looked upon with suspicion’ and that ‘in
pecuniary and some other ways, I have had to suffer for it, and shall probably
have to suffer still’. This was to prove an understatement.
Simeon Solomon, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego Preserved from the
Fiery Furnace, watercolour, 1863.
Simeon Solomon, Love Among the Schoolboys, 1865.
In a
drawing from 1865, Love Among the
Schoolboys, which was probably originally drawn privately for
Swinburne and was later owned by Oscar Wilde,
Solomon presents a decidedly homoerotic paean to romance amongst adolescent
boys. In this drawing, Love is personified as a winged angel come down to the
schoolroom, where he holds court amongst the sybaritic youths who loll about in
a hazy, stunned, erotic trance; older boys embracing younger in a reference to
ancient Greek paiderastia.
Simeon Solomon, Bridegroom and Sad Love, 1865.
In the pen and ink drawing, The Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love, from 1865, we are presented an image of a young married couple, romantically entwined and wrapped up in each other; the bride is pinning a flower into her husband’s hair. However, the groom’s hand reaches to grasp the hand of a sad Eros, who wanders beside him like a shadow. I would here like to make the point that the groom is clearly not grasping Love’s genitals, as some scholars would have it, in the (unnecessary) hope of clinching the homoerotic fact: on close inspection, one can clearly see the outline of the scrotum as well as the outline of the penis of the youthful angel, and these are both placed well above and beyond the easy grasp of the groom. That being said, as a metaphor it could not have been plainer: the groom, co-opted by society’s direction, now needs to adapt to heteronormalcy, and yet he still clearly hankers after his previous, and now precluded, lifestyle. As a presentiment of Oscar Wilde’s predicament (and the predicament of many thousands of other gay men) in the coming decades, the image would be hard to improve.
Solomon’s work is replete with stylised, mannerist figures; in this he took his cue first from Rossetti and later, Burne-Jones, neither of whom, compared to their contemporaries, was a naturally gifted draughtsman. Solomon’s lissom, androgynous boys represent a symbolic ‘type’ which had significant, even fetishistic appeal to the artist and his followers, in the same way that Rossetti’s women conformed to that older artist’s fetishised type. The following description of Solomon’s figures was written a year after his death:
A void and wonderfully vague desire fills all these hollow faces, as water fills the hollow pools of the sand… the lips are sucked back and the chin thrust forward in a languor which becomes a mannerism, like the long thin throats, and heavy half-closed eyes and cheeks haggard with fever or exhaustion. The same face, varied a little in mood, scarcely in feature, serves for Christ and the two Marys, for Sleep and for Lust. The lips are scarcely roughened to indicate a man, the throats scarcely lengthened to indicate a woman. These faces are without sex; they have brooded among ghosts of passions till they have become the ghosts of themselves; the energy of virtue or of sin has gone out of them, and they hang in space, dry, rattling, the husks of desire. (Symonds, Arthur, Nineteenth Century Painting, Archibald, Constable and Company, London, 1906, pp. 60-61).
But it should also be remembered that there was no other way for images of male/male love, or even the suggestion of it, to be aired. In a real sense, in order to deal with subjects close to his heart, Solomon had to make his youths androgynous; there had to be the suggestion that one or other of the figures could actually be female and thereby conform to the heteronormative stricture. Accordingly, as his career developed, so did his mannered approach to figuration.
Consider
the artist’s chalk drawing Italian Youth, which was made during a trip to Italy in 1869. Once again, we see
the stylised, trance-like expression so familiar from other works by the
artist: the same wide-spaced vacant eyes, the same generalised Rossetti-esque lips,
and the same rounded chin. This is not a flesh-and-blood figure with any sense
of life outside the (un)reality of the drawing; it is a figure of hermetically
sealed, bland, homoerotic fantasy. This was the case with so many of Solomon’s
figures, projected by the artist to fill the gap between reality and desire; ciphers
which would be easily recognised by gay men of the period, but which could also
pass as merely ‘historic’ or ‘Grecian’ (or, in many instances, even as women) to
those with more orthodox heterosexual tastes and desires.
Simeon Solomon, Love Confronted by Death, 1874.
Simeon Solomon, Until the Day Breaks and the Shadows Flee Away, 1874
We see this pattern emerge time and again in Solomon’s work: consider, for instance, the watercolours My Soul and I, Love Confronted by Death and Until the Day Breaks and the Shadows Flee Awa. It is safe to assume that all the figures in these works are male, although the features of each of the figures have been stylised to such a degree that they sometimes cross into epicene caricature. Clearly, Solomon had an idealised type in mind, which triggered a deep erotic nerve. In this regard he was similar to the twentieth-century homoerotic artist Touko Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland, whose endless series of stylised thugs, cowboys and sailors, displaying their perfect interchangeable faces and impossible genitals, had deep erotic significance to their creator.
Tom of Finland, cover of Kake (# 23): In the Wild West, (detail) pencil on paper, 1980.
Tom of Finland, Sauna, pencil on paper, 1970s.
Both of these homosexual artists, each in their own fashion, responded to the forms of repression of their time: Tom of Finland’s work was a gleeful celebration of the homosexual experience and its very difference from the heteronormative society in which it was compelled to exist; whereas Solomon’s art was the result of his living in an impossibly rigid culture, where any suggestion of male/male love was too shocking to countenance. Both of these artists described an ever-narrowing selection of obsessively repeated fantasy tropes.
Solomon’s grave is a meagre, cinder-strewn plot in the Willesden Jewish Cemetery; the headstone is smashed and worn smooth by the elements, its letters now almost indecipherable. Defiant to the end, he remained, as far as humanly possible, true to himself, in a period where conformity was all.
Even in the long years of Solomon’s
debauchery, he would astound passersby with tipsy but sonorous recitals of the
Talmud, delivered from the gutter. (James
Collard, OUT Magazine, May, 2000).
One can only hoped that whilst lying there he was, as dear Oscar, looking at the stars.
Photograph
of Simeon Solomon, in his last years, by Frederick Hollyer
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