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As Others Saw Him: A Self-Portrait by Simeon SolomonAuthor(s): Debra N. MancoffSource: Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 18, No. 2, British Art: RecentAcquisitions and Discoveries at the Art Institute (1992), pp. 146-155+187-188Published by: The Art Institute of ChicagoStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4101559 .

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As Others Saw Him: A Self-Portrait by Simeon Solomon

DEBRA N. MANCOFF

Associate Professor of Art History Beloit College

ate in life, the artist Simeon Solomon recalled how he looked in his youth: "His appearance is as follows: very slender, dark, a scar on one or two eyebrows, a slouching way with him, a certain nose, one

underlip. That is Simeon Solomon."' The verbal distance is striking. Speaking in the third person, Solomon seemed to step outside of his own

being, not just in time, but in self-understanding and identity. In part, the

intervening years account for the retrospective tone. Although undated, this

description has been traced to the last decade of the nineteenth century; Solomon, however, is referring here to a moment forty years earlier when he debuted as an artist. For Solomon, personal disengagement was not a habit acquired with age. Rather, it was the long-standing practice of his

youth and part of his search for a place in a society that positioned him outside the boundaries of convention.

This is the spirit that informs the pensive Self-Portrait drawing by Solomon in the collection of The Art Institute of Chicago (fig. i). Dated October I9, i86o, the image verifies the older artist's recollection. A dark youth, with lean cheeks and chiseled features, inclines his head in moody introspection. A wiry mass of kinky hair, a hallmark of Pre-Raphaelite beauty, forms an aureole around his face. The absence of background inten- sifies the nervous power of the rendering. But the presentation of lowered eyelids and the angle of the aquiline nose and sharp chin reveals that Solomon broke the tradition of using a mirror to observe one's features, and conceived his self-portrait from the point of view of an outside observer. In this drawing, Solomon became an observer of himself from the outside, an act of disengagement more telling and provocative than an accurate record of surface appearance.

Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) lived the life of a Victorian "outsider" both by chance and choice. As the youngest child of a respected, middle- class Jewish family, Solomon learned early the boundaries dictated by eth-

nicity and circumstance. His father, a successful importer of leghorn hats, was admired in his own community and was one of the first Jewish Free- men of the City of London. He died in Solomon's adolescence, and the

paternal role, so important in Jewish tradition, was filled by his brother,

FIGURE I. Simeon Solomon (British, 1840-1905). Self-Portrait, i86o. Graphite on

paper; 19.3 x i8 cm. The Art Institute of

Chicago, Sara R. Shorey Memorial Fund

(1987.282). The introspective expression and

posture in this drawing mark it as unusual for Solomon's mode of self imaging, and self-

portraits in general. The inclined head and lowered eyelids contradict the use of a mirror by the artist, a traditional technique for self depiction, and suggest that the viewer is someone other than the artist himself.

147



.



Abraham, who saw to his security and education, and his sister Rebecca, who directed his religious study. The three Solomon children were all gifted painters, and each left an impression on the Victorian art world.2

Victorian society was hardly congenial to differences of religion and race, but during Simeon's childhood the Jewish populace gained its first real civic acceptance. In 1847, Lionel de Rothschild was elected to the House of Commons and became the first acknowledged Jewish member of Parliament.3 Rothschild's victory was dulled by his inability to take his seat until 1858, when a modification of the oath "by the true faith of a Christian" allowed him to serve his government without compromising his faith. In that same year, Simeon Solomon debuted at the Royal Academy and his painting Isaac Offered marked the first in a series of Old Testament subjects that made his reputation.

In the late I85os, Solomon also entered the Pre-Raphaelite circle, sharing his artistic ideals with Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Morris, and Edward Burne-Jones. His friendship with poet Algernon Charles Swinburne led him away from his religious interests and into unconventional and dangerous ter- ritory. Homoerotic subjects, loosely disguised as classical allegories, replaced Solomon's fascination with Old Testament lore. He embraced a life of open sexual defiance and excess. Solomon's sensual intoxication, in turn, led to his social and professional ruin. In 1873, he was arrested on a charge of homosex- ual solicitation, and he spent the remaining three decades of his life in penury and disgrace. Friends shunned him, patrons avoided him, and the Jewish community, as recorded in his own words, "-the Nathans, Solomons, Moses, Cohens etc. et hoc genus homo-would have nothing to do with him."4 His birth dictated one form of exclusion; his actions incurred another.

For someone like Solomon, whose ethnic background, professional profile, and sexual orientation departed from the norm, the boundaries of Victorian society were clear. It was as a Jew in a Christian world that he first learned the rules of marginalization. While London had a substantial native Jewish community-the population reached over twenty thousand in

I85o, ninety percent of whom were born in England--stereotypes rather than individual experience shaped popular perception.5 In literature, for example, two antithetical types summarize the portrayal of Jews. Both were exaggera- tions with little basis in reality. One romanticized the Jew-Sir Walter Scott's vulnerable but noble Rebecca in Ivanhoe (1819) or Benjamin Disraeli's

princely and magnanimous Sidonia in Coningsby (1847)-giving eastern exoticism an Old Testament pedigree. The other ridiculed-Rebecca's money-hungry father or Charles Dickens's monster Fagin of Oliver Twist

(1837-38)--offering validation for the most extreme racial prejudice. A similar dependence on exaggeration was seen in public perception. The flamboy- ant posturing and ethnic appearance of Benjamin Disraeli eclipsed the mod- est, assimilated demeanor of figures such as Moses Montefiore or Lionel de Rothschild, and epitomized Jewish traits for the broad population. Whether Jews were perceived as eastern exotics at the top of the social ladder or as venal tricksters at the bottom, the end result was the same. Recognition of ethnic identity meant separation from general English society.6

While never denying their heritage, neither Abraham Solomon nor Rebecca Solomon used it to delineate their professional identity. Ethnic and Old Testament subjects occupied a small place in their work.7 Abraham, in particular, cultivated a social reputation as a well-bred painter, hosting "conversaziones" for up to two hundred guests, including luminaries of the conventional art world such as Frederic Leighton. But this did not erase the

148 MANCOFF



FIGURE 2. Simeon Solomon. Carrying the Scrolls of the Law, 1867. Watercolor and

gouache; 35.7 x 25.5 cm. University of Manchester, Whitworth Art Gallery (D.I919.8). Solomon painted several versions of this image of ritual devotion, including two large oil paintings of 1871, now in the West London Synagogue and the Art Gallery of Baroda in India. The com-

plete absorption of the figure as he cradles the scrolls of his ancestors is reminiscent of the pensive withdrawal that distinguishes the Art Institute drawing in fig. i.

stigma of stereotype and difference, as seen in George Du Maurier's well- intentioned description of the elder Solomon's circumstance: "The very kindest people of my acquaintance are Jews, the Levyes and the Solomons for instance. I dined at the Solomons, tremendously rich people, I believe, and holding a very swell place in the artistic world."8

In contrast, Simeon Solomon explored his religion through his art, publicly celebrating his own ethnicity. As stated above, he debuted at the Royal Academy with an Old Testament subject and continued to exhibit similar works throughout his career.9 Jewish themes played a prominent role in his published illustrations as well. In 1862, he drew vignettes of religious practice, including "Lighting the Candles on the Eve of the Sabbath" and "The Marriage Ceremony" for the journal Once A Week. Similar works appeared in Leisure Hour in 1866. He produced designs based on the Song of Solomon and the Book of Ruth, and, during the i86os, he illus-

A SELF-PORTRAIT BY SIMEON SOLOMON 149



FIGURE 3. Simeon Solomon. Self-Portrait, 1859. Pencil on paper; 16.5 x 14.6 cm. London, Tate Gallery. In this portrait, Solomon presented himself as a Pre-

Raphaelite. His wide, transfixed eyes and his flowing hair are traits preferred in the Pre-Raphaelite code of beauty, while the sketch of the knight and lady in the

right corner associate Solomon with the circle's neomedieval repertoire.

trated twenty scenes from the Old Testament; six were published in i88o in Dalziel's Bible Gallery. The complete suite appeared in Art Pictures from the Old Testament of 1897. Solomon continually explored subjects of Jewish ritual throughout his career, as in his 1867 painting Carrying the Scrolls of the Law (fig. 2), but in the early i86os his own devotion grew lax. He eventually abandoned religious observance. For Solomon, Judaism served as an identity rather than a faith, and his ethnic heritage and public image were indivisible.

The private nature of the Art Institute self-portrait, however, reveals more about Solomon's personal identity than his public image. In his earliest known depictions of himself, Solomon made no reference to his ethnic-

ity; instead, he joked about his youth and stature. On the frontispiece of a sketchbook dated 1855, Solomon's self-caricature appears as a tiny figure before a palette. In frock coat and top hat, flanked by Amazonian angels, he hoists a gigantic pen across his shoulders."' The same little form appears again in a caricature of 1857, sketched on the second sheet of a letter to sculptor Alexander Munro. Here Solomon was comparing his size to a pair of Sydenham trousers. The letter is a polite and boyish refusal of an invita- tion to an evening salon. Solomon lamented:

The hour is very late and not long before my hour of retiring. I am afraid that Mr. Boyce has given you to understand that I am a man, but I am only just turned 17 and am very small and not advanced enough in manners to become the guest of grown up gentlemen."

150 MANCOFF



By the end of the decade, with greater confidence in his position and talent, Solomon dropped the veil of caricature and portrayed his natural appearance. Two self-portraits in pencil, one from 1859 (fig.3) and the other from i86o (fig. 4), show a handsome youth with regular features, distinguished by wide, melancholy eyes and a generous mouth. A comparison with a photograph of Solomon (fig. 5) dating from around 1870 confirms the accu- racy of his rendering. In the earlier drawing, Solomon appears as a Pre- Raphaelite beauty, slightly sad and self-involved, with thick, flowing hair framing his face. The background strengthens the artistic connection: the medieval vignette in the upper right corner is reminiscent of Rossetti's chivalric images of the same era. Both drawings describe Solomon as a sen- sitive youth of a particular circle, but at the same time they function as a record. The frontal position of the head suggests that Solomon used a mirror to check his appearance.

Words, rather than images, record how Solomon appeared to others.12 To his contemporaries, he possessed a single, salient attribute: He was a Jew. Descriptions catalogue presuppositions and prejudices about Jewish appearance. Emily Ernestine Bell noted in her diary, "He is very young, ugly and Jewish looking, with strange eyes and a gentle soft voice."'3 Oscar Browning recalled, "Simeon was certainly not good-looking, rather the reverse. . . He was very Jewish but not of the attractive type."'14

Even within the Pre-Raphaelite circle, Solomon's ethnicity became his emblem. While his Jewishness suggested the exotic East to his artist friends,

FIGURE 4. Simeon Solomon. Self-Portrait, i86o. Pencil on paper. Collection of Mark Samuels Lasner. Of all of Solomon's self-

portraits, this is the most straightforward. Depicted with conventional dress, posture, and expression, Solomon seems to have been more intent here on recording his features than exploring his identity.

FIGURE 5. Photograph of Simeon Solomon, c. 1870. Courtesy of Jeremy Maas. Solomon was photographed several times in his life. This photograph shows him at the age of

thirty, at the height of his career. Contem-

porary descriptions of Solomon's appearance vary widely, from a characterization as ugly and "Jewish looking" to handsome and graceful. This photograph suggests there was nothing extraordinary about his

appearance and that the power of racial

stereotype, rather than any unusual com- bination of features, influenced the way others saw him.

A SELF-PORTRAIT BY SIMEON SOLOMON 151



FIGURE 6. Simeon Solomon. King David

Dancing before the Ark, 186o. Pencil, brown and black ink on paper; 27.9 x 40.6 cm. London, private collection. King David's dance of joy is the Old Testament

subject of this drawing. The figure just right of the center-the young man playing the

harp-appears repeatedly in Solomon's

early work. Its clear resemblance to the Art Institute self-portrait suggests its function as a personal emblem of the artist.

FIGURE 7. Simeon Solomon. Hosannah, i86o. Pen and brown ink on paper; 28.5 x 24.8 cm. San Marino, California, Huntington Library and Art Gallery. Like many Victorian artists, Solomon replicated his own works and reused images that satisfied him. Solomon returned to this drawing for a design repro- duced in the Dalziel's Bible Gallery of i88o, and he based other images, including the

harper in King David Dancing before the Ark (fig. 6) and the young man in Carrying the Scrolls of the Law (fig. 2), on its posture and type.

it also gave them license to use bigoted nicknames such as "the Jewjube" (Burne-Jones) and "wandering Jew" (Swinburne).15 Biographers have portrayed Solomon's ethnicity as the key to his acceptance among the Pre- Raphaelites. Habitues of Rossetti's studio supposedly were "greatly attracted by the handsome young Jew,"'6 but this attraction also provided a basis for exclusion. Even within his own circle, he was separate.

A similar stance colors contemporary criticism of his work. Swinburne explained his genius as "at once of east and west, of Greek and Hebrew...a kindred Hellenist of the Hebrews."17 William Blake Richmond credited Solomon's vision to race, claiming his works "seemed to be written in Hebrew characters; no one but a Jew could have conceived or expressed the

depth of national feeling which lay under the strange, remote forms of the archaic people whom he depicted."'8 Even the Jewish Chronicle voiced the dominant ethos, citing "strong Jewish feeling" as Solomon's artistic

strength.19 While Solomon's own emphasis on racial identity-demon- strated in his cultivation of Jewish subjects and a refusal to follow his brother's and sister's patterns of assimilation--may have functioned as a

strategy "to market himself as a purveyor of Jewish exoticism,"20 it was also an identity thrust upon him by his friends, by his critics, and by a society that perceived his community through convention rather than experience.

In the Art Institute self-portrait, Solomon envisioned himself as the observed rather than the observer. Like his contemporaries, he looked at his external appearance from a distance, enforced by presupposition and con-

I52 MANCOFF



A SELF-PORTRAIT BY SIMEON SOLOMON 15 3



FIGURE 8. Simeon Solomon. Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytelene, 1864. Watercolor; 33 x 38.1 cm. London, Tate

Gallery. While history separates the poets Sappho and Erinna by two centuries, Solomon joined them in love and friend-

ship in the female community devoted to Aphrodite on the island at Lesbos. Solomon's interest in classical subjects coincided with his close relationship with Algernon Charles Swinburne in the i86os. This particular subject may testify to Swinburne's influence on Solomon, for in 1863 the poet was working on Atalanta in Calydon, a daring poem hinting at sexual inversion.

154 MANCOFF



vention. The image offers a passive complicity to the viewer. The inclined head and lowered eyelids invite an unrestricted gaze. It is not as if the

subject is unaware of this observation; in fact, the compression of the features, particularly seen in the eyes and the mouth, suggest a submission to unrelenting scrutiny. In such a posture, Solomon defined his image as one to be studied as an object, and the absence of background heightens the emblematic emphasis.

Solomon's choice of posture admits his willingness to be scrutinized. His portrayal of himself here as a Jewish "type" is evidenced by his repeti- tion of this posture in the figure of a temple harper, an androgynous figure he used in several contemporary Old Testament subjects. The harper first

appears as a middle-ground, supporting figure in King David Dancing before the Ark (fig. 6), drawn five months before the self-portrait. He

emerged again as the central subject in another drawing of i86o known as

Hosannah (fig. 7), which served as a study for an oil painting (unlocated) of the same name, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1861 under the descrip- tive title, "A Young Musician Employed in the Temple Service during the Feast of the Tabernacle."21 The image of the harper mirrors the Art Institute

self-portrait in posture, in face, and in moody retrospection. Even the mass of kinky hair-and Solomon's own hair was more wavy than kinky-is the same. In association with these images, the ethnic inference is revealed. When, as in the self-portrait, Solomon assumed an external point of view, he saw what he learned from others to see. He saw the stereotyped Jew.22

From I865, when Solomon first enjoyed success as a classical painter with the gladiatorial subject Habet! (Kill Him!), until 1873, the year of his

public humiliation, Solomon submerged his Jewish identity under the posture of an aesthete-hedonist. Homoeroticism and sexual inversion entered his repertoire in the language of classicism, the covert but recognized code of the mid-Victorian era for same-sex love. In works like Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytelene (fig. 8), Solomon used fourth-century Greece to express feelings forbidden in nineteenth-century England. Even in life, a "Greek" identity gave him some liberty to reveal himself, but his Jewishness remained his emblem of difference.

An anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, serves to mark Solomon as a con- scious shape-shifter, complying with yet at the same time jarring his audi- ence. Once, entertaining Lord Houghton and Swinburne while costumed as a Greek youth in laurel wreath, drapery, and sandals, he suddenly trans- formed himself into "a Jewish prophet, and declaimed in sonorous voice long passages from the Hebrew ritual which he learned as a boy."23 The observed turned the tables on the observers. As a man, he would learn to mock the conventions that barred him from accepted society, and eventually he chose to dwell outside its repressive boundaries. But, in i86o, Solomon was still a youth searching for his place in a world that decreed him different. In the Art Institute self-portrait, he stands with those he could not join, in order to realize the self as outsider and to first develop the habits of estrangement and disengagement, habits that would allow him to survive on the margins of society.

A SELF-PORTRAIT BY SIMEON SOLOMON I 5



Farington (note 3), the wine merchant C. Offley asserted that de

Loutherbourg was "nearer to nature than Turner, who appears to be striving to do something above nature" (May 18, 1804; vol. 2, p. 239); and Benjamin West expressed his admiration for de

Loutherbourg (Apr. 30, 1804; vol. 2, p. 234). Turner's attraction to avalanche scenes can be seen in The Art Institute of Chicago's Val d'Aosta (1836), where the mountain slopes seem to dissolve into a vortex of color.

52. At this time (I805-o6), de Loutherbourg was named History Painter for the Duke of Gloucester.

53. De Loutherbourg was buried in an "unattractive monument"

designed by Sir John Soane at Chiswick Churchyard; see Dobson

(note 5), p. I25; and Levallet-Haug (note 5), pp. 93-94.

54. The Destruction of Pharaoh's Army was not listed among these

paintings; see Coxe (note 45).

55. Farington (note 3), vol. 2, p. 237 (May 10, 1804). Lawrence also admired de Loutherbourg's Eidophusikon, seeing it as responsible for the move in stage decor from a "rhetorical to a pictorial art." See Allen, "The Stage Spectacles of Philip James de Loutherbourg" (note 22), p. 320.

56. Indeed, each artist seemed to have held the other in

high esteem. De Loutherbourg supported Turner's nomination to the Royal Academy in 1802, and Turner is said to have moved to Hammersmith Terrace in i8o8 to be nearer to the creator of the Eidophusikon. See Farington (note 3), vol. 2, p. 340 (Feb. 10, 1802).

57. Boase (note 30), p. 167.













57. Boase (note 30), p. 167.













57. Boase (note 30), p. 167.













57. Boase (note 30), p. 167.

BRADLEY, "Elizabeth Siddal: Drawn into the Pre-Raphaelite Circle," pp. 136-145.

i. The Art Institute of Chicago's Beata Beatrix is a replica of a

picture in the Tate Gallery, London, begun immediately after Siddal's death. See Debra N. Mancoff, "A Vision of Beatrice: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the Beata Beatrix," The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies 6 (Mar. 1985), pp. 79-82, for a discussion of the original portrait memorial to Siddal and the later, slightly altered version.

2. The other founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were William Michael Rossetti (brother of Dante Gabriel), James Collinson, Frederick George Stephens, and Thomas Woolner.

3. The standard book on the Pre-Raphaelites is Timothy Hilton, The Pre-Raphaelites (London, 1970). A useful source of information on individual pictures is London, Tate Gallery, The Pre-

Raphaelites, exh. cat. (1984), which documents the most recent

major exhibition to focus on the group. An excellent discussion of Siddal and other women artists associated with the Brotherhood can be found in Jan Marsh and Pamela Gerrish Nunn, Women Artists and the Pre-Raphaelite Movement (London, 1989).

4. Siddal took advantage of this offer for less than two years (1855-56).

























5. Charlotte Gere and Geoffrey C. Munn, Artists' Jewelry: Pre-

Raphaelite to Arts and Crafts (Suffolk, 1989), p. 59.

6. Jan Marsh discussed the various roles, including that of victim, that Siddal has assumed in literature on the Pre-Raphaelites written

during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the treatment of Siddal as Rossetti's victim, for example, see Marsh, The Legend of Elizabeth Siddal (London, 1989), pp. 116-17.

7. In his 1969 film, Dante's Inferno: The Private Life of Dante

Gabriel Rossetti, Ken Russell presented Rossetti's life after Siddal's death as completely consumed by guilt, leading eventually to drug addiction and collapse. The film biography represents a melodra- matic version of the truth: Rossetti did become addicted to chloral, and functioned poorly after a breakdown in the late I870s until his death in 1882.

8. Deborah Cherry and Griselda Pollock, "Woman as Sign in Pre-

Raphaelite Literature: A Study of the Representation of Elizabeth

Siddal," Art History 7 (June 1984), pp. 206-27.

9. Sheffield, Ruskin Gallery, Elizabeth Siddal: Pre-Raphaelite Artist, 1829-1862, ed. Jan Marsh, exh. cat. (199I), pp. 28-29.

io. Elaine Shefer, "Deverell, Rossetti, Siddal, and 'The Bird in the

Cage,"' Art Bulletin 67 (Sept. 1985), p. 444.

Ii. From Ford Madox Brown's diary, quoted in Helen Rossetti

Angeli, Dante Gabriel Rossetti: His Friends and His Enemies

(London, 1949), P. 189. It is difficult to date this third-hand remark because it comes to us from Rossetti's granddaughter, who must have had access to Brown's diary. This type of flawed evidence is typical of "primary" documents used by some

Pre-Raphaelite scholars. Another example is William Holman Hunt's Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brother-

hood. This autobiography, published in 1905, is indeed a major repository of information about the role of Hunt and his "brothers" in the Pre-Raphaelite cause. Hunt's ver-

sions, however, of events and conversations remembered and recorded up to fifty years after they occurred are too often treated by scholars as hard facts instead of flawed memories

manipulated to guarantee Hunt's own importance in the Pre-

Raphaelite "revolution."

12. For example, see Virginia Surtees, "Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal," in Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Rossetti's Portraits of Elizabeth Siddal, exh. cat. (i991), p. 8.

13. Stephanie Grilli, "Pre-Raphaelite Portraiture, 1848-1854" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1980), p. 210.

14. Jon Whiteley, "Portraits of the Model," in Oxford, Ashmolean Museum (note 12), p. 14.

is. Sheffield, Ruskin Gallery (note 9), p. 25.









































































MANCOFF, "As Others Saw Him: A Self-Portrait by Simeon Solomon," pp. 146-155.

i. As quoted in Julia Ellsworth Ford, Simeon Solomon: An

Appreciation (New York, 1908), p. 25. The quotation is not direct. Ford claimed it was sent to her by a "friend" and attributed it to the last decade of the artist's life.

NOTES FOR PAGES I35-I47 187















2. Little has been written on the Solomon family. The best source of information is the Geffrye Museum catalogue Solomon: A Family of Painters (London, 1985). For Solomon's life and ethnic identity, see esp. Lionel Lambourne, "Simeon Solomon: Artist and Myth," pp. 24-27, and Monica Bohm-Duchen, "The Jewish Background," pp. 8-12.

3. Contrary to popular belief, the first acknowledged Jewish member of Parliament was not Benjamin Disraeli, whose baptism at the age of thirteen eased his way into politics. He took his seat in Commons in 1837. He never, however, forgot his origins. For a contemporary summary of the civic life of the Jewish community in Victorian England, see Lucien Wolfe, "The Queen's Jewry, 1837-1897," in Essays in Jewish History (London, 1934), PP. 309-62.

4. Ford (note I), p. 25.

5. See Steven Bayme, "Jewry and Judaism," in Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia, ed. Sally Mitchell (New York, 1988), pp. 411-13. For the popular image of the Jew, see Anne Cowen and Roger Cowen, Victorian Jews Through British Eyes (Oxford, 1986). I am

grateful to Professor David Itzkowitz of Macalester College for

guidance in this area.

6. For more on Jewish identity, see Vivian D. Lipman, "The

Anglo-Jewish Community in Victorian Society," in Studies in the Cultural Life of the Jews in England, ed. Dov Noy and Issachar Ben-Ami, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Folklore Research Center Studies, no. 5 (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 151-64.

7. Rebecca and Abraham did not exhibit Jewish subjects at the

Royal Academy. Early in his career, Abraham painted works such as A Rabbi Expounding the Scriptures (1840) and In the Synagogue (1842), but after he made his reputation as a sentimental genre painter, he dropped such subjects from his repertoire. See Bohm- Duchen (note 2), pp. 8-12.

8. Du Maurier made this remark in a letter to his sister Isabel (July 1861) describing the biases of his friend Tom Armstrong, whom Du Maurier accused of "running down Jews like a stupid schoolboy." As for the "swell place in the artistic world," Du Maurier added, "though I don't go in for S's painting." See Daphne Du Maurier, The Young George Du Maurier (London, 1951), p. 56.

9. Other Old Testament subjects exhibited at the Royal Academy include Moses (i86o); A Young Musician Employed in the Temple Service during the Feast of the Tabernacle (known as Hosannah; see fig. 7 in the present essay) (1861); The Child Jeremiah (1862); The Betrothal of Isaac and Rebecca (1863); and Judith and Her Attendant Going to the Assyrian Camp (1872).

io. The sketchbook, the earliest known work of Solomon, is in the collection of the Mishkan Le'Omanut, Ein Hardon Kibbutz in Israel. For an illustration of the frontispiece, see Lionel Lambourne, "A Simeon Solomon Sketchbook," Apollo 85 (Jan. 1967), p. 57.

11. Ibid., p. 60. Lambourne dated the letter October/November.

12. Solomon modeled only once for Rossetti, posing as Saint James in a stained-glass window design for Christ Church, Albany Street, London, but his face is partially obscured by Saint John's halo.































13. Diary entry, Dec. 30, 1866, as quoted in Lambourne, "Simeon Solomon: Artist and Myth" (note 2), p. 24.

14. As quoted by Ian Anstruther, Oscar Browning (London, 1983), p. 58.

15. Edward Burne-Jones to Algernon Charles Swinburne in an undated letter (1866/68), in Philip Henderson, Swinburne: Portrait

of a Poet (London, 1974), p. 13o; and Swinburne to George Powell (Mar. Ii, 1873), in Cecil Y. Lang, ed., Swinburne Letters, vol. 2 (New Haven, Conn., 1959), p. 234. Swinburne also wrote to Powell (Feb. 14, 1873), "I think S.S. without his Jewish barbiche must be an obscene spectacle." See Lang, vol. 2, p. 231.

16. G. C. Williamson, Murray Marks and His Friends (London, n.d.), p. 169.

17. A. C. Swinburne, "Simeon Solomon: Notes on His 'Vision of Love' and Other Studies," The Dark Blue I (July 1871), p. 569.

18. As quoted in A. M. W. Stirling, The Richmond Papers (London, 1926), p. 16o.

19. Jewish Chronicle, Aug. I, 1862. See Bohm-Duchen (note 2), p. io. Even more recent writers have succumbed to this tendency. Alfred Werner, as recently as 1960, explained Solomon's intensity as "the earnestness and pent-up emotions of a Yeshivah bocher" (Talmud student). See Werner, "The Sad Ballad of Simeon Solomon," Kenyon Review 22 (i960), p. 399.

20. Jeffrey Laird Collins, "Prototype, Posing, and Preference in the Illustrations of Frederich Sandys and Simeon Solomon," in Pocket Cathedrals: Pre-Raphaelite Book Illustration, ed. Susan P. Casteras (New Haven, Conn., 1991), p. 86.

21. Gayle Seymour identified the Art Institute self-portrait as a

study for this work. See Seymour, The Life and Work of Simeon Solomon (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Santa Barbara, 1986), p. 64. The harper reappears in Solomon's later works as a

design for a wood engraving in Dalziel's Bible Gallery, drawn in 1865 and published in i88o. Related figures can be found in The

ChildJeremiah (oil, 1861) and Carrying the Scrolls of the Law (fig. 2 in the present essay).

22. The image of the harper may have another personal connection, one with the young David. David's musical skill first brought him to the house of Saul where he met the king's son Jonathan (i Samuel

16:23). The intense friendship between the two young men, a "love

...wonderful, passing the love of women" (2 Samuel 1:26), may have appealed to Solomon as an echo of his own sexual feelings.

23. Williamson (note 16), p. 160.



































NAKANISHI, "A Symphony Reexamined: An Unpublished Study for Whistler's Portrait of Mrs. Frances Leyland," pp. 156-167.

I am very grateful to Martha Tedeschi for sparking my interest in

Whistler, encouraging me to write this article, and guiding me

though the research. Special thanks, as well, to Harriet Stratis for her helpful suggestions.









188 NOTES FOR PAGES 148-155 188 NOTES FOR PAGES 148-155 188 NOTES FOR PAGES 148-155



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