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A work by Rebecca Solomon for two English museums
24/4/23 - Acquisition - London, Tate Britain and The Museum of the Home - It is a painting that has everything to please today’s museums, presented as ‘a complex reflection on gender, race, religion and education in mid-nineteenth-century London’. Painted in 1861 by a Jewish woman, Rebecca Solomon, it features a black woman and two white girls; the youngest clutches her doll, while the eldest reads a book diligently. The title gives the key: A Young Teacher. The taller of the two children is teaching the house maid. In the background is a bookcase lined with beautiful bound books.
The artist tackled the theme of education in another painting The Governess from 1854, which offers a counterpoint to this one, showing an elegant and relatively austere woman busy getting a young boy to…