The Annunciation

Solomon's 'The Annunciation' of 1892, held at the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery, was painted nearly two decades after his 1873 arrest and conviction for homosexual conduct, a scandal that effectively ended his relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite mainstream and drove him into social marginality. That he was still producing significant religious paintings in 1892 — from a position of poverty and social exclusion — reflects both his tenacity and the continued importance of spiritual subject matter to his practice. Solomon's treatment of the Annunciation is filtered through the aesthetic of mystic interiority he developed in the 1870s and 1880s under the influence of Catholic mysticism and Kabbalistic Judaism, making his Gabriel and Mary figures suffused with symbolic light and a quality of androgynous spiritual beauty. The Russell-Cotes's acquisition of this late work represents a revaluation of Solomon that has continued into the present day.

The late painting shows Solomon's technical methods under the constraints of reduced resources and social isolation: the surface is more thinly painted than his Pre-Raphaelite works, with colour applied in washes that create a spiritual luminosity but lack the jewelled density of his early canvases. The androgynous figure types — particularly the angel — are rendered with his characteristic softness of modelling, avoiding hard outlines in favour of suffused light.