Eye Candy for Today: Solomon J. Solomon’s Breakfast Table

Comments

4 responses to “Eye Candy for Today: Solomon J. Solomon’s Breakfast Table”

1. 

   aelle

   July 25, 2014

   I agree when he, Solomon, requotes Rubens that “It is very dangerous to use white and black.”
   The woman, in black with her legs up on the sofa, in the painting is obviously a widow; his mother-in-law, and the person sitting opposite her is his grown-up daughter, who in the two paintings on the wall are the same daughter’s portraits as a child. I could be wrong. Is the portrait on the far right wall one of his late wife?
2. 

   aelle

   July 25, 2014

   I was wrong, the mother-in-law is his wife. But why dress in black when one’s spouse is still alive and painting? That would be the question I’d ask if I were in the room with them.
   http://benuriholocaust.lgfl.org.uk/Documents/Discussion%20Sheet%20-%20Solomon%20The%20Breakfast%20Table.pdf
   1. 

      Charley Parker

      July 25, 2014

      My thought is they may be artificially posed, and dressed as they are, at the request of the artist for the sake of his composition.
3. 

   aelle

   July 26, 2014

   During WWI Solomon was Lieutenant-Colonel, to enable him the design of armoured observation posts disguised as trees, techniques that were already in use by the French.
   The British artist Solomon J. Solomon began his experiments with camouflage on the first day of the war. Created out of dyed butter muslin and mounted on bamboo canes in his mother-in-law’s garden in St Albans, his prototypes convinced him that it would be possible to screen trenches from enemy surveillance. Approached by Solomon, the War Office ordered further trials at Woolwich dockyards. The results were encouraging, but it took him many months to convince the military authorities of the advantages of employing artists. In a letter published in the Times on 27 January 1915, he pointed out that ‘invisibility is an essential in modern strategy.’ Since ‘to be invisible to the enemy is to be non-existent to him,’ he urged that the principle of countershading should be applied to the army’s khaki uniforms. This ‘more scientific’ adjustment would mean ‘clothing the lower limbs in a much lighter stuff than the body, and the cap and the shoulders’. Solomon also declared that the existing cap was conspicuous against most backgrounds, and ‘a most excellent target for the marksman’. It should be replaced with a helmet-shaped version, fitted with a visor that could be lowered to break up the visible outline of the face. As for the short tunic, this cast a highly visible shadow on the legs: better a long coat that could be buttoned back for marching and stiffened to reduce visible flapping. Against ‘colour uniformity’, Solomon saw advantages in the ‘broken effect’ that would be achieved if the men in each unit wore different coloured coats and tunics – winter blue, grey-green, khaki.
   General Haig, Commander-in-chief of the British forces in France, therefore instructed that Solomon be given the temporary officer’s rank. http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portraitLarge/mw93888/Solomon-Joseph-Solomon?LinkID=mp04176&role=sit&rNo=6