Niobe1.0072_Solomon

Niobe1.0072_Solomon

OGCMA s.v. "Niobe"
NY Public Library digital

Solomon Joseph Solomon, 1860-1927, "Niobe with her children" oil on canvas, 1888, now lost and substituted by a wood-cut engraving.

Kestner discusses this painting in Mythology and Misogyny: the social discourse of nineteenth-century classical subject-painting (Wisconsin, 1989), 244 as a simplex statement of his thesis, that "as pictorial ideograms, [Solomon's paintings and his peers'] were an integral part of a broad-based value system that reinforced patriarchal dominance by inculcating misogynistic and gynophobis attitudes among the broad public." Niobe hereby, in Solomon's treatment "Niobe's sexuality is her doom".

The image at right is derived from the New York Public Library's digital reproduction of the original painting.

Kestner also see in Solomon's Niobe and his Judgment of Paris similar "masculinist definitions of women" in the later nineteenth Century.

OGCMA slides are designed by Roger T. Macfarlane for use in Classical Civilization 241 courses at Brigham Young University.
The present resource contains information assembled for The Oxford Guide to Classical Mythology in the Arts, 1300 - 1990's, edited by J. Davidson Reid (Oxford 1994), and it is used with express permission from Oxford University press.
Address concerns or inquiries to macfarlane@byu.edu.