Lot 48: Waiting for the Verdict; and Not Guilty

Abraham Solomon, A.R.A. (1824-1862)
Waiting for the Verdict; and Not Guilty
signed and dated 'Asolomon 1859' (lower left)
oil on canvas
25 x 35 in. (63.5 x 88.9 cm.)
a pair

London, International Exhibition, 1862, nos 720 and 734, lent by C.T. Lucas.
London, Earls Court Exhibition, 1897, nos 316 and 323.
Ottawa, Art Gallery of Ontario, Tissot Retrospective, 1968.

Probably commissioned by Charles Thomas Lucas, who owned them in 1862.
Mr and Mrs Joseph Tanenbaum.
Anonymous sale, Christie's, London, 3 February 1978, lot 126.

VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium.
The paintings are reduced replicas of Solomon's most famous works, which were bought for the Tate Gallery (now Tate Britain) in 1983. Solomon was the elder brother of Simeon and Rebecca Solomon who also made their names as artists, Simeon being one of the most brilliant members of the Pre-Raphaelite circle in the 1850s and '60s. Their father, Michael Solomon, was a member of the Gold and Silver Wyredrawers Company, and in 1831 became the first Jew to be made a Freeman of the City of London.

Abraham studied at Sass's drawing school in Bloomsbury and at the Royal Academy Schools, and began to exhibit at the Academy in 1841. His early paintings were eighteenth-century genre subjects taken from Sterne, Goldsmith and other authors, but in 1854 he scored a triumph with two modern subjects, First Class - The Meeting and Second Class - The Parting. These cleverly linked two themes that obsessed the mid-Victorians: flirting and railway travel.

Waiting for the Verdict and Not Guilty were even more successful. The first, which appeared at the Academy in 1857, shows the scene outside a provincial courtroom where a young man, perhaps an agricultural labourer, is up for trial on what seems to be a serious charge. His wife and father are gripped by anxiety and despair; his old mother, more stoical, holds a crowing baby, while another child sleeps in peaceful oblivion a faithful dog looks on. An older girl, perhaps a sister, turns to look at the opening doors of the courtroom from which the magistrates are issuing. Being exhibited alone, the picture invited the spectator to agonise about the outcome, but two years later the suspense was broken when the sequel - Not Guilty - was in turn shown at the Academy. From the first the paintings were recognised as the artist's masterpieces. Waiting for the Verdict was on the whole preferred to Not Guilty, but both were enormously admired for their vivid portrayal of human emotion and drama. Even John Ruskin, who was not normally given to praising this type of picture, admitted that Waiting for the Verdict was 'very full of power', although this did not prevent him from siding with Millais when a row broke out at the Liverpool Academy in 1857 as to whether his Blind Girl (Birmingham Art Gallery) or Solomon's picture should win the annual prize. The Academny gave this prize to Millais, but many traditionalists thought that Solomon should have won. When in 1858 the Academy defiantly awarded the prize to another Pre-Raphaelite artist, Ford Madox Brown, the Liverpool town council cut off its funding and within ten years it had run out of money and ceased to hold exhibitions.

Such was the popularity of Solomon's two pictures that he was commissioned to paint no fewer than three sets of replicas. One is now in the Tunbridge Wells Museum, while the second seems to be untraced. The present pair was probably commissioned by a patron called C.T. Lucas, who certainly lent them to the International Exhibition held in London in 1862. One of the other pairs must have been made for the engraver W.H. Simmons, who executed mezzotint reproductions that sold in vast numbers.

Unfortunately, Solomon did not live to see this final triumph. He succumbed to heart failure at Biarritz in 1862 on the very day that he learnt of his election as ARA. All three Solomon children were ill-fated. Ten years later Simeon's career was in ruins following his conviction for homosexual offences, and Rebecca was to die an alcoholic.

The Tate Gallery (as it then was) bought the original versions in 1983 as outstanding examples of Victorian narrative painting with a strong element of social realism. The paintings are also of interest in that legal themes, though prominent in contemporary fiction, most obviously the novels of Dickens, are comparatively rare in Victorian genre painting. Last but not least, Waiting for the Verdict and Not Guilty are important as the masterpieces of one of the first Jewish artists to make a significant contribution to British art. Indeed no Jewish artist before or since has scored a greater hit in his day than Solomon did with these two pictures.