The old-fashioned outfits worn by the boys in this drawing connect the image to Eton College, an elite British secondary school. Solomon was close friends with Oscar Browning, a reforming educator and assistant master at the school who sought to reform long-established, cruel disciplinary methods. Browning's ideas likely inspired the image which centers on the winged figure of Love preaching to boys of varying ages in a schoolroom. Some seem transfixed, some embrace their fellows, and one reacts with suspicion. Around this date Solomon devoted a series of line drawings to the Greek philosophical idea that the closest human intimacy was possible only between persons of the same sex. Repressive Victorian social mores and legal penalities meant that the artist sought veiled ways to express his own homosexuality.
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Artwork Details
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Title:Love Among the Schoolboys
Artist:Simeon Solomon (British, London 1840–1905 London)
Credit Line:Bequest of James David Draper, from the Robert Isaacson Collection, 2019
Accession Number:2021.15.7
Inscription: Lower right: "SS / 65"
Possibly Oscar Browning (British); Said to have been owned by Oscar Wilde (Irish), gift to the following; Said to have been owned by Alfred Bruce, Lord Douglas (British), sold by after 1894; John Sparrow (British); James David Draper
Lionel Lambourne "Abraham Solomon, Painter of Fashion, and Simeon Solomon, Decadent Artist." Transactions (Jewish Historical Society of England). Vol. 21, 1962–67, Plate XXVIII, fig. 21, p. 285: "Love Among the Schoolboys," in the possession of John Sparrow, Esq.".
Simon Reynolds The Vision of Simeon Solomon. 1984, Fig. 38, in Private Collection, Oxford; "A provocative drawing once owned by Oscar Wilde".
Robert Aldrich The Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy. London, 1993, p. 142 notes that Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde's lover, owned a collection of Solomon's drawings, including "Love Among the Schoolboys.".
Emmanuel Cooper The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West. London, 1994, p. 67, notes that Solomon's drawing of "Love Talking to Boys" (private collection), hung on the walls of Oscar Wilde's rooms at Oxford and that Lord Alfred Douglas sold it after Wilde's trial.
John Loughery "Canons and Causes." The Hudson Review. Vol. 56, no. 1, 2003, pp. 171-72, notes that Oscar Wilde owned Solomon's "Love among the Schoolboys.".
Colin Cruise, Roberto C. Ferrari, Debra N. Mancoff, Elizabeth Prettejohn, Gayle M. Seymour, Frank C. Sharp, Victoria Obsorne Love Revealed: Simeon Solomon and the Pre-Raphaelites. Ex. cat., Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, October 2005-January 2006; the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, March 9-June 18, 2006; and the Ben Uri Gallery, The London Jewish Museum of Art, September 11-November 26, 2006. 2005, cat. no. 102, p. 147, ill.
Michael Matthew Kaylor Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde Michael Matthew Kaylor, Secreted Desires: The Major Uranians: Hopkins, Pater and Wilde, Ch. 4, 'A Sort of Chivalrous Conscience': Pater's Marius the Epicurean and Paederastic Pedagogy," footenote 1, p. 219. 2006, Ch. 4, 'A Sort of Chivalrous Conscience': Pater's Marius the Epicurean and Paederastic Pedagogy," footenote 1, p. 219, discusses owner ship of the drawing by Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas.
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