Dear ARLIS/NA-ers,
As many of you know, I was the lucky recipient of the 2002 ARLIS/NA H. W.
Wilson Foundation Research Award for my project "The Letters of Simeon
Solomon (1840-1905)." That award made a big difference in my research, as
it helped finance my travel expenses to Yale University and the University
of British Columbia to do research. As a result of some of that research,
I have published one article this year in _The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite
Studies_ (Spring 2003) on Solomon's unpublished letters. Other
publications will come from my research over the next few years, I'm
sure. One lesson to be learned from this experience is that everyone
should apply for the ARLIS/NA Research Awards if you have any
art/library-related project that could use some funding. There is an good
chance you will benefit from this fantastic opportunity our organization
provides.
At this time, I thought I would make an appeal to my fellow art librarians
regarding Solomon's letters and see if you might be able to provide some
assistance. Because Solomon is still a relatively obscure artist, very few
repositories/archives/libraries even know that they have material by or
about him. I am writing to see if you would be willing to check your local
library catalogs or even old card catalogs to see if there is any
correspondence by Solomon in your libraries. (Even more rare, but of
interest to me, are letters by his brother Abraham and his sister Rebecca
Solomon, who were also artists.) I have of course consulted WorldCat,
RLIN, Archival Resources, other random online catalogs, etc., as well as
the Historical Manuscripts Commission and the Artists' Registers Papers web
site databases. With that in mind, I can tell you that I have been
successful in identifying letters by Solomon and obtaining copies of these
letters from the following places, thanks to the assistance of the
librarians and their assistants there: University of Rochester, Yale
(Beinecke Library), University of British Columbia, The Pierpont Morgan
Library, Duke University, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Harry Ransom
Humanities Research Center at University of Texas-Austin.
For those unfamiliar with Solomon, here's a brief synopsis. He was a gay
Anglo-Jewish Victorian artist who made a career for himself painting Jewish
and Greco-Roman subjects, mostly during the 1860s. He was a regular
exhibitor at the Royal Academy for about 15 years, until he was arrested in
1873 for public indecency and his public career essentially ended. He was
an active member of the second wave of Pre-Raphaelite artists and was a
close colleague and friend of the more famous British artists such as Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, etc., and the poet
Algernon Charles Swinburne, among others. For more on Solomon, check out
my web site on him at http://www.fau.edu/solomon, which also won the first
ARLIS/NA Worldwide Books Electronic Publication Award.
I strongly suspect there are many other libraries out there with works by
him in their collections as random items no one is even aware of as being
important. If you discover anything, please do let me know by emailing me
at [log in to unmask]
My thanks in advance to my fellow ARLIS/NAers!
-- Roberto
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Roberto C. Ferrari
Chair, GLIRT
Past President, ARLIS/SE
Florida Atlantic University Library
PHONE: 561-297-3575
EMAIL: [log in to unmask]
WEB: http://www.library.fau.edu/geninfo/people/rferrari.htm
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