VICTORIAN RADICALS
From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement
Yale Center for British Art
Gay & Lesbian Review
August 26, 2020
IT WAS IN THE 1960s that I was first drawn to the artists of the 19th-century Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB)—to their sultry, soulful women and their tender and gallant Arthurian men. The aggression and materialism of modern capitalist society were under attack in the ’60s, and many a countercultural youth, myself included, found a kinship with the PRB sensibility from the Victorian period: a love of nature and the bucolic, and the call for a simpler, gentler, and more æsthetically-infused way of life.
Right before the Covid-19 pandemic closed everything down in early March, I was able to revisit the work of these dissenters. It was a faux spring day as I walked across the historic 17th-century, Puritan-designed New Haven Green to the Yale Center for British Art to see the exhibit Victorian Radicals: From the Pre-Raphaelites to the Arts & Crafts Movement. The exhibit drew heavily from extensive holdings in the Birmingham (England) Museums, which, in collaboration with the American Federation of Arts, had organized it.
There were the iconic works by the Pre-Raphaelite art stars: painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti and painters William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais. These three young men were barely out of their teens when they founded the movement in 1848. Having seen only reproductions in the past, I was stunned by the beauty of Rossetti’s Beata Beatrix, in which Dante’s muse is seen in a state of rapture.
Also in the Yale exhibit were works by PRB-associated artists who came of age later, such as Maxwell Ashby Armfield and his dazzling Tristan and Isolde, made with watercolor, gouache and gold paint, and his Self-Portrait, with the brooding artist wearing a pink ascot, his delicate fingers holding a paint brush, a glass vase of lavender flowers standing nearby. (The work was used over a century later for the cover of the Oxford World’s Classics 2006 edition of Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray.)
The big discovery for me was Simeon Solomon (1840– 1905)—a name I didn’t recognize—who had two works in the Yale show: Babylon Hath Been a Golden Cup (pen and ink, 1859) and Bacchus (oil painting, 1867). With a little research, I found that Solomon, younger than the first wave of PRB artists, was considered an equal by his peers. Artist Edward Burne-Jones, a close friend, remarked that Solomon was “the greatest artist of us all; we are mere schoolboys compared with you.” But as a homosexual man with two arrests made in public urinals, his reputation has suffered. (Art historians Roberto C. Ferrari and Carolyn Conroy have created the indispensable Simeon Solomon Research Archive, which continues to gather material related to Solomon’s life.)
In Bacchus, one of three versions that Solomon produced on the subject, the Greco-Roman deity is seen wearing a garland in his hair and holding a staff that rests on his shoulder. With soft eyes, lips slightly pursed, and a face like silk, a muscular neck and thick fingers that denote a strong hand, Bacchus is equal parts yin and yang. Who was this artist, I wondered, and why hadn’t I heard of him?
Solomon was the eighth and youngest child in an affluent, culturally sophisticated English Jewish family. Two of his siblings, Abraham and Rebecca, were also accomplished painters. At an early age, Solomon was influenced by the Bible and by Shakespeare, and he was drawn to Rossetti’s work. Precocious, he exhibited his drawing Isaac Offered at the Royal Academy when he was just eighteen. The work alludes to the account in Genesis of God testing Abraham by telling him to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham seems willing to comply, but at the last minute God sends a messenger to stop him, and a ram is sacrificed instead.
The turning point for Solomon was his arrest in London in 1873, at age 32, for attempting to commit “the abominable crime of buggery” at a public urinal with a sixty-year-old stableman. Both men were found guilty, and Solomon spent six weeks in detention. A year later, he was arrested again at a public urinal in Paris, charged with “outrage public à la pudeur” (outrage to the public decency), and served three months in jail. In the aftermath of these arrests, Solomon lost the support of most of his circle, including the sexually unorthodox poet Swinburne, a constant companion at one point, with whom Solomon was known to cavort around Rossetti’s house in the nude, much to Rossetti’s consternation.
Solomon’s arrests were traumatic and demoralizing—he became an alcoholic—and they certainly affected his career. But despite intermittent periods of poverty and living at times in workhouses, the artist was undeterred from making art. In the period from 1873 to 1891, Carolyn Conroy tells us, there were thirteen exhibitions in which his work appeared, including the 1887 Anglo-Jewish Historical Exhibition at the Royal Albert Hall, which was devoted exclusively to Jewish art.
What also seems to have followed from the arrests was a kind of liberation that allowed Solomon to explore his sexuality more fully in his work, along with the idea of love between men, which is the basis for his extraordinary prose poem of 1871, “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep.” Writes Conroy: “Solomon’s personal journey of same-sex love, or ‘Divine Love’ as he alludes to it in the poem, reveals itself in hundreds of works.” These encompass “a spiritual mix of Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Greek myth. Many of these images maintain Solomon’s earlier use of the sexual and moral ambiguity of the androgyne.”
The artist uses both classical and biblical allusions in an attempt to develop the model for a homosexual identity reconciled with a Judeo-Christian moral heritage. It is a quest for a spiritual center that goes beyond the sensual while not excluding same-sex desire, aspiring to a synthesis of desire with a higher, even a divine, form of love.
In the late 1980s, during the height of AIDS-related homophobia, British playwright Neil Bartlett paid tribute to Solomon with his theatrical piece, “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep,” taking the same title as Solomon’s poem. Appearing nude on stage, Bartlett’s defiant performance echoed Solomon’s own refusal to bend his art to conventional expectations. Regarding Solomon’s life, Bartlett commented that the “fall of the artist” was “an unapologetic survival of ‘disgrace,’” his life “an instructive contrast to the neatness of the fable of Oscar Wilde.”
Due to the way their lives were upended—on the basis of acts deemed morally repugnant and legally punishable—comparing Solomon to Wilde (who owned works by Solomon) is unavoidable. Solomon was short in stature—“certainly not good looking, rather the reverse,” wrote historian Oscar Browning, who knew the artist. Arrested twice, he was partly broken, but he remained unrepentant and prolific, and he was committed more than ever, post-arrests, to making art. The towering Wilde, shrouded in celebrityhood, clamoring for a courtroom brawl with Victorian justice, was ruined. In his martyrdom, wavering between repentance and unrepentance, Wilde grappled with the meaning of his suffering and, on his deathbed, converted to Catholicism.
While it may be tempting to pigeonhole Solomon as a gay artist or a Jewish artist, historian Aileen Elizabeth Naylor believes this limits an appreciation of the wider scope of his work. She argues that a focus on his “marginalized identities” has been overemphasized, that his representations of the female figure have been sidelined, and that he needs to be reconsidered in relation to “the broader social and cultural contexts in which he worked.”
Was Solomon a great artist of the Pre-Raphaelite and later the Æsthetic movement who happened to be Jewish and homosexual? Do these classifications matter? I would argue that his queerness does matter to the extent that it contributed to his partial erasure from art history, starting in his own lifetime. Gaining recognition for artists who struggled alone with internal conflict and survived bigotry and its penalizing effects is still very much a work in progress.