Yesterday I blogged briefly about Simeon Solomon, the gay Jewish Pre-Raphaelite painter whose life was the subject of a talk I attended on Saturday. I promised you a bit more, so here it is.

As I noted, Solomon was one of the best, if not the best, of the Pre-Raphaelite artists. Had he not been convicted of “attempted buggery”, he would have gone on to bigger and better things, despite the enormous handicap in Victorian society of being Jewish. As it was, he had more exhibitions than any of his colleagues before his social ostracism.

Amazingly, Solomon carried on paining afterwards. He spent the rest of his life (32 years of it) living as a vagrant in London, and keeping going by selling fabulous work at knock-down prices to hypocrites who were happy to buy his art but not to welcome him into their homes.

One of Solomon’s favorite themes was the love triangle with two men and a woman, in which one of the men is newly married to the woman, and his boyfriend stands sadly to the side. The painting at the top, titled “The Sleepers, and the One that Watcheth”, is pretty clearly of Sam, Rosie and Frodo, though Solomon can’t have known that at the time. He would have adored slash.

Frank Vigon, who gave the talk, has spent years raising money to restore Solomon’s grave to a state befitting a great artist. That’s now done. Frank writes about Solomon and the project at The Advocate. His latest project is to raise money to fund PhDs in art history to be given to people interested in going out and researching other unjustly forgotten artists.

Below the cut I’m going to paste some more of Solomon’s work so that you can see the astonishing range of styles that he mastered.