Arthur Hacker (1858-1919)

Arthur Hacker was a fellow Royal Academy painter and a contemporary of Solomon Joseph Solomon, both having trained in the 1870s–1880s and contributed to the same tradition of late Victorian academic figurative painting. A portrait of one artist by another is a distinctive subgenre of portraiture: informal, often intimate, and likely produced out of friendship or collegial respect rather than institutional commission. The 1884 date places this at the beginning of both men's mature careers. Executed on panel — a smaller-scale support often used for cabinet portraits or intimate works — the painting suggests an informal, spontaneous character. It provides insight into the social networks of the Royal Academy in the 1880s and into how painters saw and depicted each other in an era before photography dominated informal record-keeping.

Panel as a support allows for a tight, precise surface. Solomon would have worked with relatively thin paint layers on the panel's smooth ground, capturing Hacker's likeness with the directness appropriate to an informal between-artists portrait rather than the more finished treatment of formal institutional commissions.