Head

Simeon Solomon, the youngest of a family of painters, developed his own art out of elements in the work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones and the French symbolist Gustave Moreau. Although his two siblings, Abraham and Rebecca, were realist painters, Simeon Solomon was drawn to the aestheticism that aorse in the early 1860s from Rossetti's example. This is evident in <em>Head</em>, which also refers to the Venetian tradition of sumptuous romantic heads and rich colour. Never firmly established with either the public or critics, Solomon had to produce 'potboilers' such as this at many stages of his career to make ends meet. They resemble the heads in his group compositions but are probably separate peices. They needed little in the way of invention, and attracted buyers who had neither the space nor the funds for larger, more complicated works on canvas.

Solomon was ostracised by many, including former friends, when his homosexuality became widely known in 1873, and he gradually fell victim to alcoholism and chronic poverty. Many of his contemporaries spoke sadly of such works as <em>Head</em>, regretting the squandering of Solomon's talent on projects that wasted his abilities. Certainly this work is a dilution of earlier, more elaborate works such as <em>Bacchus</em> (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery) and <em>The Sleepers</em> (Art Gallery and Museum, Warwick), yet it contains much that is essential to Solomon's art. The unidentified subject - who could be either male or female - is set against the merest suggestion of a landscape and gazes into the wide blue yonder beyond the picture space. Evoking both Pre-Raphaelitism and the richly layered art of the Renaissance, the work suggestively shares monumentality and lyricism at the same time, a rare combination that Solomon learned from Burne-Jones and Titian. Other artists in the 1880s and 1890s absorbed these influences as well, and Solomon's late work has a close affinity with that of Evelyn De Morgan and John Strudwick, all three of whom were described together as inheritors of Burne-Jones's legacy.

See:  Pamela Gerrish Nunn, 'Simeon Solomon', in William McAloon (ed.), <em>Art at Te Papa</em> (Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2009), p. 57.