On September 20, 2000, the Simeon Solomon Research Archive premiered on the World Wide Web. It was the first research site dedicated to the life and art of the gay Anglo-Jewish Pre-Raphaelite/Aesthetic artist Simeon Solomon (1840-1905), and one of the earliest academic sites on some aspect of Pre-Raphaelitism. The SSRA was an augmented version of my annotated bibliography published in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (Spring 1999). Over the years I enhanced the web site, gradually adding full-text sources, such as reviews from The Art Journal, and digital images of works by Solomon. In 2002, the SSRA was honored with the ARLIS/NA Worldwide Books Electronic Publication Award. More recently, updates have included a bibliography of works about Simeon’s sister, Rebecca Solomon (1832-1886), whose work I have studied and now written about as well.

While the SSRA has been a personal achievement, the site’s success has far exceeded my expectations. While I realized the site would increase recognition of Solomon’s work, I did not expect some of the results that have taken place over the past seven years. Almost immediately after its premiere, I began to hear from professors and librarians who told me they utilized the site as an example of free, high-quality research material on the Internet, as compared to commercial or personal sites with questionable information. I also received emails from students around the world asking me a range of interpretive questions about Solomon’s works, his symbolism, his Judaism, and so on. I was even contacted by international private collectors. Some of these individuals actively collected Solomon’s work, while others had no idea they even owned works by Solomon and were able to use the SSRA to discover who he was.

Even more important than the development of the SSRA has been the evolution of studies on Solomon himself. Although he never will be a household name, those in the Pre-Raphaelite world are now aware of his importance to the movement and see him as a major figure among the second generation of Pre-Raphaelites. Much has happened regarding Solomon studies over the past seven years. Colin Cruise and Victoria Osborne co-curated the highly successful centenary-of-his-death exhibition that opened at the Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery in 2005 and traveled to Munich and London. Published for the exhibition is the catalogue Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites (London: Merrell, 2005), a work that now stands with Gayle Seymour’s 1986 dissertation as being among the essential resources on Solomon. Conferences and symposia on Solomon have taken place at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Yale Center for British Art, and University of York. I have begun transcribing and publishing some of his extant letters for the first time, and I am aware of two PhD dissertations and one MA thesis being written on Solomon.

The SSRA has grown from a few web pages in the beginning to its current state with 52 web pages, 38 full-text transcriptions, and 38 digital images. In the early days of the Internet, copyright legislation was vague on what constituted authorized use of protected works on the Internet. I have always taken a more conservative stance and used material in the public domain or by securing permission from owners of works of art before using digital images on the site. Maintaining the SSRA is a labor of love, but it could not exist these days without the valuable assistance of Julia Kerr, who currently hosts the site for me at http://www.simeonsolomon.org. At seven years old, the SSRA continues to grow and hopefully to assist in studies on Solomon, at least for another seven more years.

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