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Simeon |
M., W. "Art Notes." The Illustrated London News, 26 August 1905: 312.
A friend of Burne-Jones and Rossetti, Simeon Solomon was watched by the interested eyes of many great men during the earlier days of his career and during the 'sixties. Lady Burne-Jones has recorded her husband's admiration for his work: "I remember his telling me before we were married about a book filled with Solomon's designs, which he said were as imaginative as anything he had ever seen--here was the rising genius--to which I listened with a jealous pang! This artist afterwards became a friend of mine, as well as Edward's, and the tragedy of his broken career is one before which I am dumb; but all the more do I cling to recollections of hope and promise, surely not false, though unfulfilled in this
world." The sweetness and sanity that never fails the biographer of Burne-Jones is apparent in the little sentence which best suffices for his obituary record. (page 312, columns 1 and 2)
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Mr. Simeon Solomon's death in St. Giles's Workhouse leads us to say that although his art was essentially uncommercial, it would have been well able to give the means of livelihood to the artist had he been of normal temperament and reasonable habits. But this great artist did not possess the art of living. For twenty years life had been a struggle, and it is even doubtful if the attempt at its alleviation by friends and admirers made it easier for Mr. Solomon to meet or to endure his doom. His work was charged with the suggestion of an overstrained emotional capacity; and certainly in life Simeon Solomon was without that comfortable insensitiveness which leads along the happy middle way. The tragedy is not exhausted in the language of the daily paper which sorrows over the fact that one who exhibited at the Royal Academy should die in a workhouse.