The eighth child of Michael Solomon and Catherine Levy, Simeon was born in London on October 9, 1840. His father, a merchant who sold Leghorn hats, and one of the first Jews to be named a freeman in the City of London, died when Simeon was a teenager. Simeon’s brother Abraham taught him studio drawing while his sister Rebecca was responsible for his Jewish education. Though negative stereotypes about Jews pervaded, Victorian society slowly accepted their presence. In 1858, Lionel de Rothschild was the first Jew to assume a seat in the House of Commons. That same year, Solomon showed Isaac Offered at the Royal Academy, the institution he would later reject. In his twenties, Solomon was one the youngest artists to join the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of painters and poets formed in 1848 as a reaction against the established Royal Academy. The Brotherhood’s name reflected its members’ desire to return to the morality and sincerity that characterized art before the Italian Renaissance, literally pre-Raphael. The Pre-Raphaelites often included religious symbols and figures in their art, and Solomon’s choice of subjects fit right in, although as a Jew he remained an outsider. This otherness, combined with his homosexuality and androgyny, caused his peers to perceive him as exotic.

Solomon, attracted to men in defiance of the law, was arrested for indecent exposure in a London public bathroom in February 1873 at the age of 32. Convicted of sodomy and sentenced to six weeks or hard labor, Solomon lost his reputation amongst the Pre-Raphaelites and was rejected by the art establishment. The following year, in Paris, arrested for soliciting men, Solomon spent another three months in jail. Unable to sell work with his tarnished reputation, Solomon turned to family and friends. Without support from the art world, Solomon soon became a pariah, homeless and alcoholic, spending the latter years of his life at the St Giles parish workhouse where he died of heart failure on August 14, 1905. Fifteen years of success, prosperity and respect, Solomon turned his back on it all, and deliberately lived the remainder of his life as an exile, among the social outcasts. The end of his accomplishments came as abruptly as it began.

Although extensive subcultures existed in cities, homosexual identity had only started to emerge in the 1870s; the terminology was not used in Great Britain until much later. The law forbade specific sexual acts, but until 1885, it did not explicitly forbid all expressions of male same sex love. Androgyny took on a special significance with regard to sexuality in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It was neither sordid nor illegal. Not only Pre-Raphaelites like Edward Burne-Jones, but also Gustave Moreau and Fernand Khnopff often depicted gender neutral models. For Solomon, the Kabbalah’s perspective that Adam was created as both male and female before being separated into two creatures, completed the notion of perfection of one gender. This spiritual identity possibly helped him overcome some of the adversity of being different.

Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego is one of Solomon’s most ardently Jewish subjects, representing the protection God granted to the Jewish heroes from the fiery furnace. When the three men refused to worship Nebuchadnezzar’s ninety-foot-high golden image, the Babylonian king demanded their execution. Filled with rage, he ordered the furnace to be heated up more than seven times as usual and the strongest guards to secure the captives. Checking the furnace, the king spotted three unbound figures accompanied by a Godsend angel. Astonished, Nebuchadnezzar proclaimed “any people, nation, or language that utters a blasphemy against the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego shall be torn limb from limb, and their houses laid in ruins; for there is no other god who is able to deliver in this way” (Daniel 3:29).

The red-headed figure on the left is modeled on Algernon Charles Swinburne, the English poet who wrote about many taboos including lesbianism, cannibalism and sadomasochism. It has been suggested that Simeon portrayed himself on the right and his sister Rebecca as the angel, though they resemble his favorite recurring androgynous facial types. The person on the right also appears in Solomon’s Two Acolytes Censing: Pentecoast of the same year, now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.[1]

[1] Bodycolor on paper mounted on canvas, accession no. WA1957.83 [https://collections.ashmolean.org/object/91035]