When Walter Pater published ‘The School of Giorgione’ in the Fortnightly Review in October 1877, he furnished the Aesthetic movement with the sentence that became its watchword: ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ Simeon Solomon had made the present work nine years earlier in 1868. Exhibited at the Dudley Gallery the following spring as ‘A Song,’ the watercolour is the subject which Walter Pater’s famous essay expounds, demonstrated before it was written down. The scene is the act of listening; the figures do nothing else; narrative is withheld; iconographic reading is resisted as actively as it is invited. What Pater would articulate in prose, Solomon had already painted.

The Dudley Gallery had opened in the Egyptian Hall in 1865 as the first regular London venue to show watercolours by young artists outside the closed ranks of the Old and New Societies, and by 1869 it had become the informal headquarters of the cohort, Solomon, Edward Burne-Jones, Walter Crane, Albert Moore, whose work would be institutionalised at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1877. Solomon showed three pictures there in 1869, of which A Song was the most considered. The Art Journal thought his exhibits had ‘seldom shown so much brilliance or singularity’; the strongest came from an unsigned Westminster Review notice by E. F. S. Pattison, the future Emilia, Lady Dilke, model for Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch, who judged it ‘beautifully composed and beautifully coloured’.

The composition reads as a shallow frieze in the Parthenon manner, set against a dark-panelled wall hung with a worked cloth of classical figures. Nine young men and women, dressed in fanciful neo-Regency and disposed across the picture plane in loose groupings, register the music; none plays except the seated figure at the centre. In white, auburn-haired, her fingers just touching the keys of an ebony-and-ivory harpsichord, she is the performer, and every other gaze confirms her. The instrument itself is of some interest: Christopher Payne has suggested it is English, made by Jackson and Graham in the mid-1860s to a design by George Aitchison, the architect of Leighton House, a piece from the Leyland-Leighton ambit. To her left, a youth in a purple shirt leans on the instrument; a girl in yellow rests her cheek on his shoulder. Behind the keyboard, two further figures embrace. On the right, a blond youth reclines on a patterned rug, his head tilted against the knee of a dark-haired woman in a blue gown whose gaze has lifted from the music altogether. At the extremities stand two further figures: on the left, a red-haired youth in ochre holding a spray of blossom; on the right, a young woman in orange turning inward to join the company. The pose is music received, not music performed, the hush after the final chord has died, the audience still held by what they have just heard.

As per the Aesthetic ideal, there is no narrative to recover, no legend to key, no moral reading prepared. Composition, colour and figural rhythm are doing the work that subject matter does in the Pre-Raphaelite tradition from which Solomon had emerged, and it draws comparisons with Albert Moore’s The Shulamite (Fig. 1, 1864–6, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool) and Whistler’s Symphony in White, No. 3 (1865–7, Barber Institute of Fine Arts), which likewise elevate tonal and rhythmic structure to the status of subject.

While Aestheticism’s ideal was the suppression of subject, the boundaries between Aestheticism and Symbolism are often blurred. Solomon has introduced symbolist notes in A Prelude by Bach. The sprig of blossom held by the figure on the left has a double on the floor at lower left, fallen beside a blue sash and a glass orb: the sprig above is the ephemeral moment of music, the sprig below that moment spent. The orb is harder to place, Solomon uses crystal elsewhere for foreknowledge, and it reads here as an emblem of the transient. The red-haired figure on the left, whose likeness to the Aesthetic poet and critic Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909) is not accidental, wears a winged brooch, the insignia of Eros or Hypnos. Such details are deliberately elusive, enhancing rather than taking away intrigue.

The title A Prelude by Bach is almost certainly not Solomon’s own. In a letter of 1868 to the great Victorian collector Frederick Leyland, Solomon referred to the picture as A Song of Spring, and when he exhibited it at the Dudley Gallery it was simply A Song. The Bach title first appears at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1906, the year after his death, lent by the London dealer Ernest Brown. Brown passed it through the Leicester Galleries, then Leger in 1944, before it entered the collection of Sir Colin and Lady Anderson. Anderson (1904–1980), chairman of the Orient Line, assembled alongside his Victorian holdings a modern collection: Freud, Sutherland, Moore, Ardizzone, Bawden, Piper, Craxton, the Art Nouveau portion of which he bequeathed to the Sainsbury Centre, University of East Anglia.

Solomon’s working title, A Song of Spring, points to a specific piece. Felix Mendelssohn’s Spring Song, (Songs without Words) composed in Camberwell in the early 1840s, had become the most popular parlour piece of the 1860s; and Mendelssohn’s own gloss on those pieces, in a letter to Marc-André Souchay of 15 October 1842, reads like an anticipation of Solomon and Swinburne together: ‘What the music I love expresses to me is not thought too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite.’ The posthumous Bach title is also explicable. Mendelssohn had revived Bach, conducting the St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829 after seventy-five years of silence, which brought further arrangements by Brahms, Liszt and Naumann. The piece that sealed Bach’s Victorian popularity was Charles Gounod’s Ave Maria of 1859, a simple, soaring melody that he floated over Bach’s Prelude no. 1. In being re-titled A Prelude to Bach, perhaps in mind were audiences swooning to Gounod’s Ave Maria, and, if one is to follow the logic of the rebaptism, were paying Solomon the compliment that a painter, too, can float a melody over a Bach prelude.