SIMEON SOLOMON | In the Summer Twilight

Commissioned from the artist by the Reverend Hichens of St. Stephen’s, Canterbury in 1869;
Sotheby’s, Belgravia, 6 October 1980, lot 28;
Private collection; Sotheby’s, 4 June 1997, lot 158, where purchased by Seymour Stein

Dudley Gallery, London, General Watercolour Exhibition, 1870, no.121; Love Revealed – Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery, Villa Stuck, Munich and Ben Uri Museum, London, 2005-2006, no.105

Athenaeum, 1870, p.234; Builder, 12 February 1870, p.120; Simon Reynolds, The Vision of Simeon Solomon, 1984, pp.21, 176, illustrated pl.5; Allen Staley, The New Painting of the 1860s – Between the Pre-Raphaelites and the Aesthetic Movement, 2011, pp.111-112, illustrated pl.101

The drawing is laid down at the edges and the board is providing a stable structural support. The paper is cockling slightly. There are a few sips of faint foxing in the sky, to the neck of the central female figure, the arm of the girl in blue and the arms of the girl in white. FRAME The watercolour is contained in a simple wooden frame with a clean mount and under glass.
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‘... the figures, attired in a graceful conventional costume with a hint of the eighteenth-century about it... designs always full of the prettiest painting, abounding in poetry both of colour and feeling, in grace although not in strenuousness of form and composition, in charm and beauty.’ (Sidney Colvin, Portfolio, 1870, p.34-35) Solomon visited Italy in 1866 and made a sketch for the present watercolour (sold in these rooms, 12 March 1997, lot 158) of Italian peasant boys and girls in picturesque costume. The present watercolour was painted three years later for ‘a most charming little clergyman who unites religious unction with the broadest aesthetic views.’ (Simon Reynolds, A Vision of Simeon Solomon, 1985, p.21) It was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1870, where it puzzled the critics; ‘to what country, to what period, do the youths and maidens belong who are walking in procession, ‘In the Summer Twlight’?, whence do they come, and where are they going?’ (Builder, 12 February 1870, p.120) The subject is intended to have an enigmatic nature but could be interpreted as a melancholic musing upon the fleetingness of youth. In a similar way to John Everett Millais’ Fallen Leaves, in which an autumn evening is symbolic of the transition from girlhood to womanhood, here the glory of the last light of the day reflects the beauty of the boys and girls as they pass into adulthood. Each of the older youths are accompanied by a younger version of themselves and the word ‘Pax’ inscribed close to the signature may signify that the picture was intended as a celebration of peace. The model for the two older male figures was one that Solomon had discovered in Italy and who appears in Portrait of an Italian Youth of 1869 (University of Wales, Aberystwyth).