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Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace, October 1863 Watercolor on Paper 13 by 9 Inches

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Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace, October 1863 Watercolor on Paper 13 by 9 Inches Simeon Solomon (1840-1905) Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego in the Fiery Furnace, October 1863 Watercolor on paper 13 by 9 inches (33 by 22.8 cm.) Monogrammed & dated '10 SS 63' Provenance Christopher Wood Gallery, London Private collection, London & New York Christie’s, London, 5 November 1993, lot 128 Barry Friedman Ltd, New York, 2000 Private collection, United States Exhibited London, The Gallery, Berners Street, Winter Exhibition, February 1863, cat. 40 Dudley Gallery, Sixth General Exhibition of Water-color Drawings, January 1870, no. 45 (titled The Three Holy Children in the Fiery Furnace) London, Geffrye Museum, Solomon. A Family of Painters, 8 November – 31 December 1985; Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, 18 January – 9 March 1986, cat.no. 46, p. 68 Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery, Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, 1 October 2005 – 15 January 2006; Munich, Museum Villa Stuck, 9 March – 18 June 2006; London, The Jewish Museum of Art, Ben Uri Gallery, 11 September – 26 November 2006, cat.no. 40, pp. 90-91 New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pre-Raphaelite Legacy: British Art and Design, 20 May – 26 October 2014 Literature W.M. Rossetti, exhibition review in: Fine Art Quarterly Review, I, May 1863, p. 195 Exh. review “Dudley Gallery. Sixth General Exhibition of Drawings”, The Art-Journal, 1 March 1870, p. 87 Exh. review, Atheneum, 12 February 1870, p. 234 Illustrated London News, 12 February 1870, pp. 181-182 The Spectator, 19 February 1870, p. 237 S. Reynolds, The Vision of Simeon Solomon, Stroud 1984, pl. 31 G.M. Seymour, The Life and Work of Simeon Solomon (1840-1905), 1986, published dissertation University of California, fig. 95, p. 318 Note 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 firsts Jews to be named a freeman in London, a prerequisite to practicing business, 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. The same year, Solomon showed Isaac Offered at the Royal Academy, the institution he would later reject as a pre-Raphaelite. 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 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 utterly exotic. David Wilkie Wynfield (1837-1887) Photograph of Simeon Solomon, circa 1870 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. Sentenced to six weeks incarceration, Solomon lost his reputation and place amongst the Pre-Raphaelites and haut monde of the art world. Unable to sell work with his tarnished reputation, Solomon turned to family and friends. Without support of the established art world, Solomon soon became a pariah, homeless and an alcoholic and spent the latter years of his life as an inmate of the St Giles Workhouse where he died of heart failure on August 14, 1905. Although in cities extensive subcultures existed, the homosexual identity had only started to emerge in the 1870s although the term 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, also Gustave Moreau and Fernand Khnopff often depicted androgynous 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 at the time. Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego is one of Solomon’s most ardently Jewish subjects, representing the protection granted by God to the Jewish heroes from the fiery furnace. When the three men refused to worship the golden statue put up by Nebuchadnezzar, the 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. When checking the furnace, the king spotted three unbound figures with a Godsend angel. Astonished, Nebuchadnezzar decreed that “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 Algernon Swinburne, the English poet who wrote about many taboos such as lesbianism, cannibalism and sadomasochism. It has been suggested that Simeon portrayed himself on the right and his sister Rebecca as the angel, but there is no evidence to support this assumption.1 The suggestion does however raise the question of the remarkable similarity of Solomon’s favorite recurring facial types. 1 Reynolds, op.cit. np, pl. 31. .
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