Le jugement de Salomon

Wicar's 1785 Judgment of Solomon was painted early in his Roman period, engaging one of the most frequently depicted subjects in the Old Testament tradition — the test by which Solomon revealed the true mother of a disputed child by threatening to divide the infant between the two claimants. The subject offered painters a rich dramatic moment: the false mother's apparent acceptance of the division contrasted with the true mother's anguished sacrifice of her claim to save her child's life. The Judgment of Solomon functioned in political theory as the archetype of wisdom in governance, and its continued appeal in neoclassical painting connected royal and judicial subjects to the classical virtues being rediscovered in antiquity. Wicar's treatment in 1785 predates the full flowering of Davidian neoclassicism — the Oath of the Horatii had just been exhibited in 1784 — and reflects the transitional moment when French painters in Rome were absorbing both the lessons of antiquity and the new compositional methods emerging from David's studio.

The dramatic moment of Solomon's decision requires the painter to freeze the narrative at its point of maximum tension — the sword raised, the false mother acquiescing, the true mother pleading — while managing a complex group of standing and kneeling figures within a palatial interior. Wicar's academic training in Rome provides the figural vocabulary, with clear references to classical relief in the arrangement of the main figures.