Simeon Solomon’s work is readily identified by the sensuous beauty of his androgynous figures, exemplified in this powerful and strikingly modern portrait. The theme of ‘Night’ was a central idea throughout his work. Rather than portraying night as a terrifying darkness, Solomon treated it as a sanctuary – a realm of peace, dreams and spiritual atonement.

Two years before the present work, Solomon had written a poem, A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871). A sleeper and his soul wander through a country of dreams and meet Love in a succession of forms and conditions. Night appears in the poem as a maternal figure who takes the dying Day upon her knees, hides his passing spirit in her heart and wraps him in her dusky raiment, until, in Solomon’s phrase, ‘Day was lulled to death in the all-embracing arms of Night’.

The poem opens ‘upon the waning of the night’, when three sayings of ‘the wise King’ come to the sleeper: I sleep, but my heart waketh; Many waters cannot quench love; and Until the day break, and the shadows flee away. All three are taken from the Song of Songs (5:2, 8:7 and 2:17), and are the source of a watercolour made the same year as the present work, The Voice of My Beloved that Knocketh, now untraced yet recorded as inscribed with the rest of the verse from which the first saying comes, in which the beloved stands at the door with his locks wet ‘with the drops of the night’.

The poem was printed privately on account of its homoerotic themes and the present work gains added poignancy being completed the year he was arrested for homosexual offences – February 1874, aged thirty-two. Though supported by loyal friends and patrons, Solomon was thereafter ostracised, impoverished and died in a London workhouse. 1873 thus marked a critical turning point in Solmon’s life and career, yet none of that turmoil is evidenced in the present drawing; ‘Night’ presents itself as a beautiful vision, close-cropped and devoid of extraneous detail. Carolyn Conroy’s survey of Solomon’s output lists the work as one of nine from 1873 made in the year after his arrest.

Solomon would return to the theme of Night throughout his years of destitution, with works that possess a Symbolist outlook which resonate with the work of the Belgian Fernand Knopff, as well as his contemporaries Burne-Jones and Rossetti. Moon and Sleep, in the Tate Collection, is one such example made some twenty years after the present (fig. 1).Night is, H. Morgan records, apparently the earliest of Solomon’s symbolist heads to use ‘such an intense full-faced expression’.

In 2017 Night was lent to The Critic as Artist, the exhibition about Oscar Wilde which Michael Bracewell and Andrew Hunt curated at Reading Museum. Wilde had owned works by Solomon, and in De Profundis, the letter he wrote to Lord Alfred Douglas from Reading Gaol in 1897, he counted ‘my Simeon Solomons’ among the possessions he had lost to his creditors. Night is a timeless example by one of the Victorian Age’s tragic masters.