Symons and Print Culture: Journalist, Critic, Book Maker

Abstract

My intent here is to explore the range and ingenuity of Arthur Symons’s participation in print culture, and to probe how he managed his bread and butter work as a journalist, critic, and book maker. My focus is his article ‘The Painting of the Nineteenth Century’, in its differing functions and forms over a four-year period (1903-1906), as a periodical book review and a chapter on painting that appeared in Studies in Seven Arts, a book comprised of articles from the press. What initially drew me to this article was its evidence of Symons’s sustained support for Simeon Solomon, a queer British artist from a London-based family of Jewish painters, in the decade that followed the Wilde trials, and among the inhibitions they fostered. Nearly a generation younger than Solomon, Symons (1865-1945) was born just as Solomon (1840-1905) began his career. Solomon appears in both the 1903 and 1906 versions of Symons’s review, and in between a newspaper review of an exhibition of Solomon’s work in 1905/1906. Symons enters late into Solomon’s story in these pieces, towards the end of the artist’s life.