Day

Solomon's 'Day,' undated and paired conceptually with 'Night,' belongs to the elemental allegory subjects he developed throughout his career as a way of investing purely aesthetic figure painting with a symbolic dimension. The treatment of Day as a figure — rather than a landscape condition — connects Solomon to a Baroque and Renaissance tradition of personifying natural forces as beautiful human bodies. Solomon's Day figures typically carry warm light qualities — golden skin, luminous white drapery, solar accessories — that provide the chromatic basis for the composition. The undated status means precise placement in his career is difficult, but this type of allegorical work spans his entire active period from the 1860s through the 1890s. The Day and Night pairing allowed Solomon to explore contrasted chromatic and psychological registers within a unified symbolic programme: Day's warm expansiveness and Night's cool interiority are two aspects of a single system that reflects Solomon's enduring interest in states of consciousness at different removes from rational waking life — states that connected, in his later theosophically inflected thinking, to the soul's different modes of being.

Warm golden and white tones dominate, with the Day figure rendered as a source of light rather than as a figure lit by an external source. This requires careful glazing to create the illusion of internal luminosity, with warm underlayers glowing through cooler surface passages. The composition likely uses upward-reaching poses and open gestures to suggest the expansive quality of daytime rather than the enclosure of night.