Simeon Solomon was one of Britain‘s most interesting and challenging painters. Jewish, openly gay, witty and sensitive - but reckless, self-indulgent and self-destructive - his finest pictures were glowing and sensitive ‘synaesthetic’ renderings of poetry and music in paint, a revolutionary idea in mid-Victorian Britain. This watercolour, from his best period, in pristine condition and one of his most important and attractive works, was exhibited at the Dudley Gallery in 1869. The Dudley in the 1860s, before the Grosvenor Gallery opened in 1877, was the London exhibition venue made midwife to the birth of the painters of the Aesthetic Movement, the sister art of the so called ‘Fleshly School of Poetry’ (a term coined by the critic Robert Buchanan, insultingly, of Rossetti and Swinburne in the Contemporary Review of 1871). The pictures at the Dudley, dubbed by a critic the ‘poetry-without-grammar’ school (insultingly, the Westminster Review in 1869), were seen by then as unhealthy as the poems. However, Solomon’s pictures were greatly admired in the 1860s. There was ‘a narcotised dreaminess’ about them (The Builder, February 1870). However by 1872 the critic of The Guardian could write that Solomon had ‘taken to draw sickly dreams which can give no healthy pleasure.’ He had lost the respect of the critics, and his best customer (Leyland) had rejected him even before his arrest in 1873 for public indecency, which led to his public disgrace. The picture which seems to have made the break with Leyland was Solomon’s Sacramentum Amoris of the same year, 1868, a single figure watercolour (Leyland had paid for it in advance but it is now lost, along with eight other Solomons which Leyland owned). Swinburne described this picture as having ‘a super sexual beauty in which the lineaments of man and woman seem blended’. Like that picture, A Song is not overtly about homosexual love. 

The moment depicted in A Song seems is in the hush immediately after the last note of music has died away. The audience consists of three young men and and five young women, plus the young woman at the keyboard, all of whom are visibly moved by what they have just heard. The costume is vaguely eighteenth century, the boys dressed in silk britches and blouses, and the girls in high waisted classical dresses, all in the colours of finely wrapped Belgian pastries, chiming across the composition. The figures are arranged frieze-like in choreographed groups and classical attitudes. Solomon had been in Florence and Rome in 1866 and in 1867, and both the colour and design of A Song are reminiscent of the 1st Century BC Roman Aldobrandini Wedding fresco in the Vatican, which he would have known. The Italianesque ebony and ivory harpsichord or piano may be inspired by the revivalist designer Ferdinando Pogliani of Milan in the 1860s, but the historian Christopher Payne has suggested that it is English, made by Jackson and Graham in the mid 1860s to a design by George Aitchison, the architect of Leighton House. Solomon’s patron Frederick Leyland might have had such a piece. The shallow space and the design of the tapestry against the panelling in the background may derive from paintings by Albert Moore of the mid 1860s, The Shulamite of 1864-66, in particular (the Shulamite, it will be remembered was the subject of The Song of Solomon, but here her mouth is closed, and Moore‘s painting is mute and static - it is the absence of the song which gives the subject and heightens the mood, much as in Solomon’s picture). 

Many features in A Song are unexplained: the subject of the tapestry, whether the blossom is apple, walnut, myrtle or cherry, the meaning of the crystal ball, the meaning of the dropped sash, and the meaning of wings motif at the breast of the leftmost figure who looks a little like Swinburne, but none of this is important because A Song is about music. Solomon referred to the picture as ‘A Song of Spring’ whilst he was painting it (in a letter to Leyland in 1868), and it was originally exhibited in 1869 as A Song but the title A Prelude by Bach was possibly not even given by the artist himself - it was not exhibited under that later title until the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition in 1906, the year after Solomon‘s death. ‘A Song of Spring’ suggests that the music which has died away in the picture was Mendelssohn‘s Spring Song, one of his Songs without Words, composed in Camberwell, London, in the 1840s. Mendelssohn, who was a frequent visitor to London, meant this music to rise above literal interpretation: as the composer wrote to a friend (Marc-André Souchay, letter 15 October 1842) ‘What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite’ - which sentiment may accord with the ideas of both Swinburne and Solomon. The confusion with Bach may lie in the fact that, apart from his own music, Mendelssohn was famous for the revival of that of JS Bach, whose almost forgotten masterpiece the St Matthew Passion he had conducted in Berlin in 1829. In Mendelssohn‘s wake, popular transcriptions by Ernst Naumann aimed at making Bach’s complex counterpoint accessible to amateur and professional pianists were published in the 1860s, and there were many new arrangements of Bach, particularly by Brahms and Liszt, but by far the most popular piece was Gounod’s song Ave Maria, in which Gounod floated a simple, soaring melody over Bach’s Prelude no 1, arranged in 1859 for voice over piano. Apparently it had the power to make ladies swoon at the second crescendo, according to the composer Saint Saens who described it as 

a Bach prelude, arranged by Gounod, with violin, then with choirs, then with harmonium; one multiplied the number of violins, changing ecstasy into hysteria, then instrumental sentences became vocal and out came an even more convulsionary Ave Maria still, then they went several steps further, multiplying the performers, adding an orchestra with a bass drum and cymbals. This divine frog swelled but did not die, and the audiences went delirious in front of this monster. However, it had the advantage to break forever the ice between the author and the largest public, up to then suspicious.

Certainly Gounod’s Ave Maria might explain the swooning figure in the painting, and the later, acquired title. If you can float a melody over a Bach prelude, why not a painting? 

The moment depicted in A Song seems is in the hush immediately after the last note of music has died away. The audience consists of three young men and and five girls, plus the girl at the keyboard, all of whom are visibly moved by what they have just heard. The costume is vaguely eighteenth century, the boys dressed in silk britches and blouses, and the girls in high waisted classical dresses, all in the colours of finely wrapped Belgian pastries, chiming across the composition. The figures are arranged frieze-like in choreographed groups and classical attitudes. Solomon had been in Florence and Rome in 1866 and in 1867, and both the colour and design of A Song are reminiscent of the 1st Century BC Roman Aldobrandini Wedding fresco in the Vatican, which he would have known. The Italianesque ebony and ivory harpsichord or piano may be inspired by the revivalist designer Ferdinando Pogliani of Milan in the 1860s, but the historian Christopher Payne has suggested that it is English, made by Jackson and Graham in the mid 1860s to a design by George Aitchison, the architect of Leighton House. The shallow space and the design of the tapestry against the panelling in the background may derive from paintings by Albert Moore of the mid 1860s, The Shulamite of 1864-66, in particular (the Shulamite, it will be remembered was the subject of The Song of Solomon, but here her mouth is closed, and Moore‘s painting is mute and static - it is the absence of the song which gives the subject and heightens the mood, much as in Solomon‘s picture). 

Many features in A Song are unexplained: the subject of the tapestry, whether the blossom is apple, walnut, myrtle or cherry, the meaning of the crystal ball, the meaning of the dropped sash, and the meaning of wings motif at the breast of the leftmost figure who looks a little like Swinburne, but none of this is important because A Song is about music. Solomon referred to the picture as ‘A Song of Spring’ whilst he was painting it (in a letter to Leyland in 1868), and it was originally exhibited in 1869 as A Song but the title A Prelude by Bach was possibly not even given by the artist himself - it was not exhibited under that later title until the Royal Academy Winter Exhibition in 1906, the year after Solomon‘s death. ‘A Song of Spring’ suggests that the music which has died away in the picture was Mendelssohn‘s Spring Song, one of his Songs without Words, composed in Camberwell, London, in the 1840s. Mendelssohn, who was a frequent visitor to London, meant this music to rise above literal interpretation: as the composer wrote to a friend (Marc-André Souchay, letter 15 October 1842 ) ‘What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite’ - which sentiment may accord with the ideas of both Swinburne and Solomon. The confusion with Bach may lie in the fact that, apart from his own music, Mendelssohn was famous for the revival of that of JS Bach, whose almost forgotten masterpiece the St Matthew Passion he had conducted in Berlin in 1829. In Mendelssohn‘s wake, popular transcriptions by Ernst Naumann aimed at making Bach‘s complex counterpoint accessible to amateur and professional pianists were published in the 1860s, and there were many new arrangements of Bach, particularly by Brahms and Liszt, but by far the most popular piece was Gounod‘s song Ave Maria, in which Gounod floated a simple, soaring melody over Bach‘s Prelude no 1, arranged in 1859 for voice over piano. Apparently it had the power to make ladies swoon at the second crescendo, according to the composer Saint Saens who described it as ‘a Bach prelude, arranged by Gounod, with violin, then with choirs, then with harmonium; one multiplied the number of violins, changing ecstasy into hysteria, then instrumental sentences became vocal and out came an even more convulsionary Ave Maria still, then they went several steps further, multiplying the performers, adding an orchestra with a bass drum and cymbals. This divine frog swelled but did not die, and the audiences went delirious in front of this monster. However, it had the advantage to break forever the ice between the author and the largest public, up to then suspicious.’ Certainly Gounod’s Ave Maria might explain the swooning figure in the painting, and the later, acquired title. If you can float a melody over a Bach prelude, why not a painting?