Night and Sleep

Simeon Solomon

Date: 1888

Materials: Blue and red crayon 

Abstract concepts

After a conviction for public indecency in 1873, Solomon effectively withdrew from the establishment art world (by 1884 he was a contented resident in the St GilesWorkhouse), although the stylistic progress of his work was not necessarily drastically altered. 'Night and Sleep' is typical of the allegorical depictions of abstract concepts which he had been producing before 1873, but which became his staple work in the 1880s and 1890s. 

Spectral pallor

The critic and aesthete Arthur Symons provided an acute commentary on these ethereal images: "These faces, with their spectral pallor, are full of morbid delicacy, like the painting of a perfume. Here as always there is weakness, insecurity, but also a very personal sense of beauty. . . These faces are without sex; they have brooded among ghosts of passions till they have become the ghosts of themselves; the energy of virtue or of sin has gone out of them, and they hang in space, dry, rattling, the husks of desire".