Love Among the Schoolboys

Simeon Solomon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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 preachin 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.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Department’s vast collection of works on paper comprises approximately 21,000 drawings, 1.2 million prints, and 12,000 illustrated books created in Europe and the Americas from about 1400 to the present day. Since its foundation in 1916, the Department has been committed to collecting a wide range of works on paper, which includes both pieces that are incredibly rare and lauded for their aesthetic appeal, as well as material that is more popular, functional, and ephemeral. The broad scope of the department’s collecting encourages questions of connoisseurship as well as those pertaining to function and context, and demonstrates the vital role that prints, drawings, and illustrated books have played throughout history.

Metropolitan Museum of Art