Museum of the Home and Tate jointly acquire Rebecca Solomon’s ‘A Young Teacher’

Following the acquisition, A Young Teacher will first go to Tate Britain to be displayed this summer in their newly opened Pre-Raphaelite room. From late 2024 it will travel to the Museum of the Home to be displayed there.

A Young Teacher is a fascinating, beautiful and important painting, embodying themes of inequality in gender, race, religion, wealth and education in mid-19th century London. At first it seems to be a simple image of a child reading with her sister and a maid. The picture becomes more poignant when we consider that it was painted by a Jewish woman, one of the best-known female artists of her generation and that it depicts a working-class woman of mixed-race heritage.

The painting is a medium-sized oil on canvas in its original arched-top frame. It is signed at bottom left with the artist’s monogram ‘RS’ and the date ‘61’. It was exhibited at Henry Wallis’ French Gallery Winter Exhibition at the end of 1861 and seemingly did not sell, fading into obscurity. It was rediscovered in the mid-1980s when the Geffrye Museum (now Museum of the Home) and Birmingham City Art Gallery held an important exhibition on the Solomon family of artists and the owners of A Young Teacher contacted the curators to share the painting with them.

The main character in A Young Teacher is interpreted as the recipient of the title’s teaching, rather than the teacher herself. As a woman of black heritage in 1861, she would probably not have had a formal education and Solomon seems to be aware of this and sympathetic to it. As a member of the Jewish community living in London in the mid-19th century, Solomon was also part of a marginalised strata of society.

Solomon was particularly interested in subjects of contemporary life, often depicting gender, economic or ethnic prejudice. In 1854 she painted The Governess, comparing the lives of a working-class woman and a married woman of a higher status, within a domestic setting. In 1859 she showed her activism for contemporary social reform by joining a group of 38 female artists petitioning the Royal Academy of Arts to open its schools to women – this led to the first woman being admitted to the Academy in 1860. Solomon became the first female artist of Jewish faith to make a reputation as an artist.

This acquisition is of great importance to Museum of the Home. As they develop their galleries and collections to better represent the communities they serve, acquiring a painting where the themes of race, class, faith and gender intersect is of enormous significance.