Simeon Solomon (1840-1905)

In the present work, as with the series of drawings by Solomon referred to in lot 130, the gender of the sitter is ambiguous. A. Symons refers to this in From Toulouse-Lautrec to Rodin, London, 1929, p. 156: 'These faces are without sex: they have brooded among the ghosts of passion till they have become ghosts of themselves: the energy of virtue or sex has gone out of them, and they hang in space, dry, rattling, the husks of desire.'.