Abraham Solomon

Abraham Solomon (London 7 May 1823 – 19 December 1862 Biarritz) was an English painter.

Born as the second son of Meyer Solomon, a Leghorn hat manufacturer, by his wife Catherine, in Sandys Street, Bishopsgate in east London. His father was one of the first Jews to be admitted to the freedom of the city of London. Two members of the family besides Abraham became artists. A younger brother, Simeon Solomon, acquired much acclaim as a Pre-Raphaelite painter and exhibited at the Royal Academy from 1858 to 1872; his later crayon drawings of idealised heads are still popular. A sister, Rebecca Solomon, exhibited domestic subjects at the Royal Academy and elsewhere between 1851 and 1875, and died on 20 November 1886.

At the age of thirteen Abraham became a pupil in Sass's school of art in Bloomsbury, and in 1838 gained the Isis silver medal at the Society of Arts for a drawing from a statue. In 1839 he was admitted as a student of the Royal Academy, where he received in the same year a silver medal for drawing from the antique, and in 1843 another for drawing from the life.

Solomon died in Biarritz in France, of heart disease, on 19 December 1862, the same day on which he was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy. He married, on 10 May 1860, Ella, sister of Dr. Ernest Hart; she survived her husband.

His first exhibited work, Rabbi expounding the Scriptures, appeared at the Society of British Artists in 1840, and in the following year he sent to the Royal Academy My Grandmother and a scene from Sir Walter Scott's Fair Maid of Perth. These were followed (at the Academy) by a scene from the Vicar of Wakefield in 1842, another from Crabbe's Parish Register in 1843, and a third from Peveril of the Peak in 1845. The Breakfast Table, exhibited in 1846, and a further scene from the Vicar of Wakefield in 1847, attracted some attention.

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