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The Moon and Sleep
Simeon Solomon
1894
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Simeon Solomon attended the Royal Academy in London at age fifteen and was the youngest artist whose work was ever shown there. Early in his career, he painted Old Testament and Jewish religious subjects. Inspired by the Italian Renaissance, Solomon increasingly turned to religious mystical subjects and classical pagan themes painted in a pre-Raphaelite style. Much of Solomon’s work was homoerotic, and in 1871 his prose poem on the theme of same-sex male love, “A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep,” was attacked. His arrest and conviction for gross indecency in 1873 destroyed Solomon’s career and led to years of social condemnation, alcoholism, and poverty.
Simeon Solomon’s Carrying the Scrolls of Law, like other pre-Raphaelite paintings, explores the themes of spirituality and religious devotion. Solomon also explores the beauty of the young man…
In the evening through her garden
Wanders the Alcalde’s daughter;
Festal sounds of drum and trumpet
Ring out hither from the castle.
“I am weary of the dances,
Honeyed words of adulation
From the…
This painting of a service at the Portuguese synagogue in Amsterdam is similar to a painting for which Jacques-Émile-Edouard Brandon received a medal at the Paris Salon of 1867. Both are views of the…