By Keri O’Shea
That lesser-known member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Simeon Solomon, caused quite a stir when he exhibited his painting, entitled Habet! at the Royal Academy in 1865. Up until that point, he had been known for his religious tableaux and his sleepy, rather sexually ambiguous groups of figures – reclining lovers, figures lost in reveries. These had been successful, but Habet was very different indeed, and although Solomon had dallied with Classical scenes before, here he allowed his imagination to find a different kind of focus. Little wonder that a later critic described Solomon’s work as having ‘unmistakeable signs of genius, only run a little mad.’ To our tastes, the painting may not reveal very much – but its power is not in what it shows us, but what it doesn’t.
Rome in particular out of the whole of the Classical world had always afforded ambitious artists free rein to explore less ‘proper’ subject matter: in an often puritanical Victorian social climate, you could always claim a moral message in your art if all the blood and sex got a bit too much for contemporary tastes, but at the same time you didn’t have to scrimp on the good stuff because the histories tell us it happened. That’s not to say the moral message was never authentically there, mind you, but many Victorian artists walked the fine line between prurience and a warning from history, a desire to have fun with stories and characters so very, very far from their own time whilst calling attention to their conduct at the same time. However, Solomon took a very different approach in Habet than you’d see in a William Etty painting, for example. His take on things was very different.
Here, we have a group of wealthy and well-adorned Roman women watching the death-throes of gladiatorial combat: the title of the work, meaning ‘He has it!’ refers to one of the fighters finally having the upper hand, and we know that these women share in the high status required to command the outcome – mercy, or death – because two of them are giving the ‘thumbs down’ signal. Beautiful, young and female they may be, but they are invested in the death scene unfolding in front of them, and they have not called for mercy. But how invested are they, really? The different faces in the group each reveal a different reaction to the scene (with the exception of the servant stood at the rear, who isn’t involved in the group and isn’t even looking at what’s going on.) One of the women has fully fainted away at what she’s just witnessed; one looks with horror, but fascination; one (perhaps the most unsettling figure) is calling for the death blow with a look of rapt hunger and attention in her expression.
Perhaps more shocking still, there is also a child present, and the little girl to the right of the picture may be in the arms of her guardian but she’s being permitted to see everything that’s unfolding, which she does with a bland-eyed look of acceptance. It doesn’t surprise her or upset her. One suspects she’s seen this all before – and the same goes for the central figure in the painting, a woman dressed in all the finery of an empress, who rather than deriving anything from the combat taking place instead just has her hands clasped impassively on the balustrade. Her facial expression presents abject boredom and pitiless indifference. She is not giving the thumbs down, because she doesn’t seem to care. Her eyes are barely focused on the entertainment in front of her; those drowsy pre-Raphaelite lids suggest she’s barely keeping herself awake.
The fact that this was a group of women ‘at play’ would not have been lost on the Victorian audience who first went to see the painting. The burgeoning Victorian middle class had some highly specific ideas on what constituted feminine propriety, and women’s conduct was policed rigorously, with the art world reflecting and promoting these ideals. Seven years earlier, Augustus Egg’s triptych ‘Past & Present’ had illustrated what happened to a middle-class wife and mother who had transgressed the ‘Angel in the House’ role and taken a lover; the first painting, where her husband treads a portrait of the wife’s lover underfoot and crumples her letters in his hand, initiates the woman’s fall from grace. She does well to weep: she ends disinherited, homeless and penniless, losing access to her legitimate offspring – we last see her cowering beneath a bridge with her illegitimate baby in her arms, whilst her innocent daughters suffer under her fall from grace for the rest of their lives.
Victorian sensibilities masked barbs – and as such, Habet may be framed via Ancient Rome, but it displays the debased result of women being allowed such liberty and agency. It would have shocked many visitors to see women – not men – assenting to the death blow, or even not caring about it. Yes, Rome was representative of debasement and perhaps the message is that this sort of behaviour is why it floundered; it embodied all the worst elements of progress, and served as a cautionary tale, perhaps, of a place and time where amongst other things, even women enjoyed barbarism. Hey, there are a fair few people around today who have trouble appreciating that women enjoy watching horror films: in one case we have imagined women watching a real historic event, and in the other we have real women who watch imagined events, but in each case, incredulity and disbelief can follow. Add an innocent child into the mix, even notionally, and then as now this is deemed just cause to restrict and suppress all ‘indecent’ forms of entertainment. The battle cry of ‘children might see it’ is still used to justify censorship in the name of the greater good – UK film censors the BBFC are even today boasting of their ability to ‘grow child protection’ [sic] and they place inordinate weight on the personal verdicts of parents in their poorly-selected focus groups. Where the little girl in Habet looks so calmly at the horror unfolding in front of her, swap the scene for a screen and the anxiety is there still, in the great and the good at least.
To return to the painting’s unusual perspective, then – of the responses of viewers, rather than seeing what they are viewing – it’s not difficult to see how Solomon’s clever move tantalises his audience, then and now, and renders the painting far more evocative than an alternative, more grisly vision would be. It is a technique which has of course been used elsewhere to conjure curiosity and terror, and it’s a technique which is still in use: in modern entertainment, a mainstay of terrifying cinema is the technique of locking us out of whatever is being seen, compelling us to use our imagination (which great painters and directors both know can conjure far greater terrors than their oils or SFX). Indeed, many horror fans complain bitterly that we’re shown ‘too much’ on screen nowadays: give us some mystery, we beg, and don’t spoon-feed us every detail. Trust us: trust us to fill in the blanks.
In doing just this, Simeon Solomon both reflected and continued a tradition of communicating true unease by showing us nothing of it at all. He knew that we have evolved to be excellent readers of facial expressions, and he tells us what we need just by so diligently representing an assortment of reactions to an event so clearly imbued with horror. Whilst his painting may not seem shocking to us now, it still has the power to make us think, it still shows us how mystery can appeal, and the way his art expresses a relationship between imagined worlds and contemporary anxieties is certainly not something we’ve left behind.