Figure with head scarf

Figure with head scarf

Simeon Solomon

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This androgynous figure may represent King David, the Old Testament figure whose love for Jonathan the artist saw as a legitimizing model for love between men. The style and iconography here respond to the artist's own 1871 prose poem, "A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep," where a narrator and his soul journey through a landscape in a dream state, experiencing visions that relate to forms and conditions of love. In a series of related late works, Solomon represented one or two heads in profile using a style that moves away from the Pre-Raphaelitism of Dante Gabriel Rossetti towards Symbolism.

Drawings and Prints

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

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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.