Christ and St. Joseph of Aramathea

Joseph of Arimathea accompanied Christ’s body to the tomb, ensuring correct burial proprieties were observed and supervising the rolling of the stone across the tomb’s opening. Joseph is usually depicted as much older than Jesus – by tradition, he is acknowledged as an older relative of his mother, Mary - but Solomon depicts them as contemporaries, a variation that allows for a new reading of the relationship between the two men, expressed in the charged glance between them. In this detail, Solomon plays on the idea of the ‘sacred gaze’, a feature of early Renaissance religious art, replacing it with one more searching, full of mutual longing, sexual as well as spiritual. The watercolour has a strong, emotionally charged atmosphere, produced not by that exchange of glances alone, but also by the expressive handling of the medium and the restricted colour palette of rust brown and blue.

This composition was photographed by Frederick Hollyer and sold as a commercial print. The Hollyer platinotype, printed in a dark sepia, has a slightly cropped right-hand edge that loses the artist’s inscription and date.

We are grateful to Colin Cruise for his assistance in preparing this catalogue entry.