He was in fact a devotee of “Greek love,” the philosophy of same-sex passion derived from Socrates and Plato, which he would have known about from his Oxbridge-educated friends Algernon Charles Swinburne, Oscar Browning, Walter Pater, and others. In a post-Foucauldian world, scholars may be challenged to call Solomon a homosexual by today’s standards, but as this essay will show, he did not live his life in the closet. Since that time, Solomon has begun to be restored to a place in the pantheon of Victorian painters. The 2005 centenary of his death was the occasion for an exhibition of his work in Birmingham, England, which then moved to Munich, and then to London. Inevitably, his arrest led to the end of his public career, a tragedy in the truest sense, as his friend Edward Burne-Jones had called Solomon “the best of us all.” Even though there was renewed interest in the Pre-Raphaelites after World War II, Solomon was still shunned because of his homosexuality. Surprisingly, nothing was published in the London newspapers about his arrest, and it seems his friends didn’t know what had happened until a month later. A Jewish painter among the Pre-Raphaelites, Solomon was arrested on February 11, 1873, in a public urinal with another man and charged with attempted sodomy.
IN THE HISTORY of homosexuality in Victorian England, Simeon Solomon has re-emerged as a significant figure.
