Bacchus

Simeon Solomon

Date: 1867

Materials: Oil on wood panel; in original frame

Purely aesthetic

Solomon spent the winter of 1866-67 in Rome, where he began two pictures of Bacchus, this oil and a watercolour of the same size but different composition. While the oil was shown at the Royal Academy, the watercolour was sent to the Dudley Gallery in 1868.

This sensual portrait, undoubtedly modelled from a young Italian boy, encapsulates many of Solomon's interests and tastes, including a passion for more purely aesthetic Renaissance and Mannerist painting, which 'Bacchus' overtly reflects. 

Changing climate

His friend Walter Pater, writing at a time when homosexuality could not be publicly admitted, regarded such painting as important in establishing a climate of acceptance.

For Pater, this was not the bucolic Roman Bacchus, but the "melancholy and sorrowing" Dionysus of the Greeks.

Perhaps subsconsciously identifying the picture with its creator, Pater saw in this image: "the god of the bitterness of wine, 'of things too sweet', the sea-water of the Lesbian grape become somewhat brackish in the cup . . . an emblem or ideal of chastening and purification, and of final victory through suffering".