Night

'Night,' undated and the companion to 'Day,' represents Solomon's opposite pole of his elemental allegory. Night figures in his practice are drawn inward, cool-toned, deeply contemplative — an inversion of Day's outward warmth. Solomon's treatment of Night is related to his broader interest in states of consciousness at the threshold of sleep and vision, states he associated with spiritual perception and that connected to the Spiritualist and occultist milieu that influenced both him and his Pre-Raphaelite contemporaries. The visual tradition of Night as a figure — robed, sometimes winged, associated with poppies and sleep — runs from Michelangelo through Runge to the Victorian period, and Solomon situates his version within that lineage while filtering it through his personal symbolism. Solomon's Night also connects to his sustained engagement with androgynous beauty as a spiritual category: night dissolves the distinctions of day, including those of gendered identity, and the Night figure consequently embodies the liminal, boundary-dissolving quality he associated with visionary states. After his 1873 arrest, the symbolism of night as a space outside social definition would have taken on an additional personal resonance.

Cool blue-grey tones dominate, built through glazes over a darker ground that gives the figure a depth and mystery absent from the Day counterpart. Solomon may use contrasted warm accents — a point of gold or starlight — to prevent the cool palette from becoming funereal. The figure's closed or hooded aspect requires compositional management to maintain visual interest within a deliberately restricted palette.