Romeo and Juliet, with Friar Lawrence (pencil, pen & ink on paper)

An early drawing of the kind that the artist GP Boyce described as 'showing much Rossetti-like feeling' after he saw some sketches by the seventeen year old Simeon on a visit to his older brother Abraham's studio in 1857. These sketches, once the Pre-Raphaelites had seen them, became Solomon's 'passport into the art world'. Their awkward sensitivity, and the slender, rather stiff figures of imploring boys and innocent girls recall the earliest drawings of the Brotherhood from ten years earlier. (This drawing was the cover picture of the catalogue to the Maas Gallery's first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite pictures in 1961, that Jeremy Maas claimed was the first commercial exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite paintings held in the entire history of the movement.)