Simeon Solomon was Jewish-British artist, born in London (1840–1905) to a family of artists and was educated at the Royal Academy. Solomon was known in the Victorian art world as a genre painter. His works can be found in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the MET. In this early drawing by Solomon, Isaac is depicted as an epicene youth, tenderly kissed on the hand by his elderly father.

At its peak Solomon's career took an unexpected turn, when on the 11 February 1873, at the age of thirty-two he was arrested together with George Roberts, a sixty-year-old illiterate stableman, in a public urinal in central London, on the charge that both men had 'unlawfully attempt feloniously to commit the abominable crime of buggery'. Despite their protests, both men were found guilty of attempted sodomy and detained for six weeks in the Clerkenwell House of Detention. Two short admissions to lunatic asylums in London followed. A year later, Solomon was arrested in Paris in a public urinal with male prostitute Henri Lefranc. The artist was charged with 'outrage public à la pudeur' (outrage to the public decency), convicted and served three months in a Paris jail.

Solomon continued to produce work around the time of his arrests, and his work continued to be exhibited in provincial galleries in Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham as well as in London.
'Nearly all of Solomon's later work, of which there are perhaps four-hundred-plus known examples in existence, reflect his personal iconography or vision. Greatly influenced by Dante Gabriel Rossetti's early poetry, this vision is rooted in his 1871 prose poem A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, which describes a narrator and his soul journeying through an unknown landscape whilst in a dream state where they experience visions of various forms and conditions of true love. Solomon's personal journey of same-sex love, or 'Divine Love' as he alludes to it in the poem, reveals itself in the hundreds of works, many of them small chalk or pencil drawings and watercolours, produced over a period of thirty-three years from 1873 that reveal a complex private mythology of ideas which encompass a spiritual mix of Judaism, Catholicism, Buddhism, and Greek myth. Many of these images maintain Solomon's earlier use of the sexual and moral ambiguity of the androgyne but are generally simpler in composition than his earlier work, often concentrating on an image of one or two heads in profile. The artist's later work also reveals a move from the Pre-Raphaelitism of Rossetti to the fantasy of Symbolist imagery which suited his unique and personal journey.' Simeon Solomon Research Archive.

A print based on this drawing, titled 'Abraham and Isaac' was published in 'Dalziels' Bible Gallery: Illustrations from the Old Testament' (London: George Routledge and Sons, 1881).

Drawing, brown chalk and white ink on cream-toned paper, signed and dated bottom left. Mounted and framed; overall size: 48.4 x 37 cm.