Shipwreck of a genius

Simeon Solomon ‘has his place, not far from Burne-Jones, in any record of the painting of the 19th century. Had circumstances been kinder to him, or had he been other than himself, he would have been a formidable rival,’ wrote Arthur Symons in 1925. This Birmingham exhibition is the most comprehensive assessment yet of Solomon’s art, more wide-ranging than the last important show, held at the Jewish Museum in Camden Town in 2001 under the title From Prodigy to Outcast. Poor Solomon needs these evocative titles to pull people in because of his relative obscurity. Happily, the Birmingham show is sufficiently large and well curated that while the epithet poor will understandably remain the obscurity should surely fade.

Simeon Solomon was born in Bishopsgate in 1840, the last of the eight children of Michael Solomon, a prosperous Jewish hatter, and his wife Catherine Levy. In this cultivated household, the arts were encouraged and, in 1841, Simeon’s elder brother Abraham exhibited — aged 18 — for the first time at the Royal Academy.