Simeon Solomon (1840 - 1905)

The son of a prosperous hat importer in the Jewish community, Simeon Solomon was born in London in 1840. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1856, exhibiting at the Academy for the first time in 1858. He and fellow students founded the Sketching Club, to some extent and imitation of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Among Solomon's earliest works are drawings that parody Pre-Raphaelite subjects.

By 1859 Solomon had met Rossetti and Burne-Jones, and had begun the elaborate pen and ink drawings. Most of his early oils and watercolours are of religious, especially Hebraic, subjects. He also designed some stained-glass cartoons for Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company.

A close acquaintance with the poet Algernon Swinburne and Oscar Browning led Solomon into aesthetic and homosexual circles - he illustrated Swinburne's (unpublished) pornographic novel 'Lesbia Brandon' - and inspired his own prose poem, 'A Vision of Love revealed in Sleep'. His career and reputation suffered a disastrous reverse when in 1873 he was convicted of homosexual offences. Solomon became an impoverished recluse, eventually entering the St Giles Workhouse, Holborn, in 1884. Over the next twenty years Solomon produced hundreds of quasi-mystical chalk drawings. He died in the workhouse on in 1905.