Simeon Solomon was born in 1841.  He was the third son of Michael Solomon, a manufacturer of Leghorn hats, and the first Jew ever admitted to the Freedom of London.  The elder brother, Abraham, became a successful painter of popular subjects (’Waiting for the Verdict’ and ’First and Third Class’), and died on the day of his election to the Academy!  Rebecca a sister who was also a painter, copied with success some of Millais’s pictures.  At the age of sixteen Simeon exhibited at the Academy, though beyond a short training at Leigh’s Art School in Newman Street he was almost self-taught.  He was an early and intimate friend of the Pre-Raphaelites, with whose art he had much in common, though it is only for convenience that he is included in the school.  Like Whistler, he was profoundly affected by the genius of Rossetti.  Racial and other causes removed him from any real affinity to the archaistic moralatarianism of Mr. Holman Hunt.  For obvious reasons the Pre-Raphaelite memoirs are silent about him, but Burne-Jones was said to have maintained, in after years, ’that he was the greatest artist of us all.’  Throughout the sixties Solomon was one of those black-and-white draughtsmen whose contributions to the magazines have made the period famous in English art.  He found ready purchasers for his pictures and drawings, not only among the well-to-do Hebrew community, such as Dr. Ernest Hart, his brother’s brother-in-law, but with well-known Christian collectors like Mr. Leathart.  He was on intimate terms with Walter Pater, of whom he executed one of the only two known portraits; and in the Greek Studies will be found a graceful reference to the ’young Hebrew painter’ whose ‘Bacchus’ at the Academy obviously contributed to the ‘gem-like’ flame of which we have heard so much.

In a short-lived magazine, the Dark Blue, of July 1871, may be found a characteristic review by Swinburne of Solomon’s strange rhapsody, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, his only literary work, now a great rarity.  This is the longest, and with one exception the most interesting, tribute to Solomon ever published.  ’Since the first years of his early and brilliant celebrity as a young artist of high imagination, power, and promise,’ Swinburne says, ’he has been at work long enough to enable us to define at least certain salient and dominant points of his genius . . .  I have heard him likened to Heine as a kindred Hellenist of the Hebrews; Grecian form and beauty divide the allegiance of his spirit with Hebrew shadow and majesty.’  It would be difficult to add anything further, in praise of the unfortunate artist, to the poet’s eloquent eulogy of his friend’s talents.  An interesting piece of autobiography is afforded in the same article, where Swinburne tells us that his own poem of ‘Erotion,’ in the first series of Poems and Ballads, was written for a drawing by Simeon Solomon; and in another number of the same magazine there appeared ‘The End