Rebecca Solomon

Rebecca Solomon was born in London on 26 September 1832, into a prosperous Jewish merchant family in the Bishopsgate district. She was one of eight children, three of whom, Abraham, Rebecca, and Simeon, became professional artists. Her mother, Catherine Levy Solomon, painted miniatures as an amateur. Rebecca trained first as an apprentice and copyist in the studio of her older brother Abraham, sharing his studio spaces in London from at least 1851 to 1862. Because the Royal Academy Schools did not admit women, she also studied at the Spitalfields School of Design; the exact years of that study are not documented. She was one of 38 women artists who signed a petition in 1859 asking the Royal Academy to open its schools to women.

Solomon exhibited almost annually at the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition for roughly seventeen years, from about 1852 to 1868, and also showed her work at the British Institution, the Dudley Gallery, Henry Wallis's French Gallery, and the Liverpool Society of Fine Arts, where Behind the Curtain and Love Making in the Pyrenees appeared in 1858. Her painting A Young Teacher was first exhibited at the French Gallery in 1861 and shown again in Liverpool in 1862. Peg Woffington's Visit to Triplet, shown at the Royal Academy in 1860, was included in the 1867 Exposition Universelle in Paris. She also assisted John Everett Millais and other artists with copying work.

On 20 November 1886, Solomon was struck by a hansom cab on Euston Road in central London and died of her injuries in hospital, at the age of 54. A specialist research source has separately noted that a rumored romantic liaison with the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne is highly unlikely to be true.

Modern scholarship has worked to recover Solomon from the shadow of her better known brothers. The Victorian Jewish Writers Project credits her with a wholesome and humanizing sentiment that was uncommon in Victorian painting, and links that sensibility to her Jewish background and her exposure to prejudice and difference. Institutional interest has grown accordingly. Tate has described A Young Teacher as a landmark painting, and its joint acquisition with the Museum of the Home was framed explicitly as an act of recovering a female, Jewish Pre-Raphaelite painter for the national collection.

Solomon's market is thin and dominated by a single recent, well-documented result. Her auction high is A Young Teacher (1861), which sold for GBP 302,400 including fees at Sotheby's in London in March 2022; the exact calendar day of the sale has not been published in available sources. Princeton University Art Museum was the buyer at that sale, but a UK export bar prevented the painting from leaving the country, and Tate and the Museum of the Home jointly acquired it instead in 2023. It is now shown in Tate Britain's Pre-Raphaelite galleries. The gap between her modest Victorian-era prices and this modern institutional result illustrates how dramatically museum attention has repriced her best known work relative to her lifetime market.

Rebecca Solomon has no catalogue raisonne, no estate, and no gallery representing her market today. Attributions rest on provenance, exhibition history, and museum research rather than a formal certification body, and buyers should weight documentation heavily given the family of artists sharing the Solomon surname. Her auction record is thin, with the 2022 sale of A Young Teacher standing out as an exceptional, institutionally driven result rather than part of a deep or liquid trading history. That scarcity, paired with recent museum validation from Tate and the Museum of the Home, is the main story of her market: a small number of high-attention works surrounded by a much sparser broader trading record.