A Youth Relating Tales to Ladies

'A Youth Relating Tales to Ladies' of 1870, now at Tate, is among Solomon's most elegant and socially complex late Pre-Raphaelite works, depicting a scene of shared aesthetic pleasure in which a young man narrates stories to a group of women in a classical or timeless setting. The Tate holding makes this one of Solomon's most publicly accessible canvases and it has been extensively discussed in relation to his biography — the year before his career reached its apex in the early 1870s. The subject of storytelling connects to the oral tradition of poetry and myth that Solomon celebrated throughout his career, and the intimate grouping of figures around a central narrator offers him the compositional challenge of depicting attentive, pleasurably absorbed reception — an aesthetic state he shared with Moore but expressed through social narrative rather than pure formal arrangement.

The multi-figure composition requires Solomon to coordinate several individual expressions of engaged listening against the central figure of the storytelling youth. His characteristic use of androgynous male beauty for the narrator type is fully developed here, and the palette of warm ivory and deep burgundy creates a rich chromatic atmosphere appropriate to the intimate social occasion depicted.