Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene

'Sappho and Erinna in a Garden at Mytilene' of 1864, now at Tate, is among the most discussed works in Simeon Solomon's early oeuvre and in Victorian art more broadly for its tender depiction of intimacy between two women. Solomon painted this watercolour when he was twenty years old, showing the Greek lyric poet Sappho in a moment of close communion with her companion Erinna in the garden of Lesbos. The choice of Sappho was not innocent: Victorian classical scholarship was beginning to acknowledge the homoerotic dimensions of her poetry, and Solomon — who would later be prosecuted for homosexual conduct in 1873 — was drawn to figures and subjects at the edges of normative Victorian sexuality. The Tate holding has made this among Solomon's most reproduced works and a key document in discussions of queer visual culture in Victorian Britain. The Pre-Raphaelite medium of watercolour on paper and the intimate garden setting locate the work firmly within the aesthetic and social world Solomon inhabited alongside Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and Swinburne.

Worked in watercolour on paper, the image achieves an intimacy appropriate to its subject through its warm, golden tones and the close physical proximity of the two figures. Solomon builds the garden setting through layered washes of green and gold, while the figures' faces and the point of physical contact between them are rendered with the most careful linear attention, focusing the viewer's eye on intimacy rather than on landscape.