The Moon and Sleep

'The Moon and Sleep' of 1894, now at Tate, is a late work that brings together two of Solomon's most persistent symbolic preoccupations: the moon as a female principle of cyclic, cool, mystical beauty, and Sleep as a state of suspended consciousness in which the soul is accessible to spiritual experience. By 1894 Solomon was in his fifties, living in poverty and social exclusion, but continuing to produce work of genuine symbolic ambition. The Tate's holding of this late canvas represents a significant act of institutional revaluation — acknowledging Solomon's late work as something more than the fall of a ruined talent. The pairing of Moon and Sleep as dual figures, or as aspects of a single allegorical presence, is characteristic of Solomon's tendency to conflate and interweave symbolic categories rather than treating them as distinct personifications.

The late work shows Solomon maintaining his figure types — androgynous, softly modelled, with characteristic elongated proportions — while working with a more limited and sombre palette than his earlier productions. The lunar quality of the light is conveyed through cool blue-white tonality, with the sleeping figure receiving this light in a mode that suggests both illumination and dreaming.