The Letter

Mountains in Engelberg
Oil on board, 7 x 9 in. 1924

Ben’s five months in Europe ended with a trip to Switzerland to paint in Engelberg and Lucerne. Ben was able to take this trip to “the top of the world,” as a friend wrote on the back of a photo of Ben in the Swiss mountains, because he had received notification from the United States Lines that the S.S. Leviathan’s return trip to America was postponed. Instead of leaving on October 7, 1924, the ship would sail for New York on October 16^th.

Presumably, Ben would have been pleased to have a few more days painting in Europe. Unfortunately, he may have rued those extra days. Cecilia Solowey, his 63-year-old mother suffered a fatal heart attack on October 9^th, two days before her birthday. While he would have not made it home for the funeral, he could have participated in the week-long shiva for his mother had his ship left when originally intended.

For Ben, who had only recently celebrated his own 24^th birthday on August 29^th, this meant he returned home an orphan. His father, Abraham, had died in February 1924 when he was struck by a trolley in Philadel

phia while walking to synagogue on a Friday night. He was taken to the Presbyterian Hospital but was turned away because he was Jewish. By the time he taken to a second hospital he was dead. His death and another eventually lead the State Legislature to pass a law that required any hospital that received state funds to accept all emergency patients.

Ben had already left his family home, and he still had three brothers and one sister, plus assorted cousins, in the Philadelphia area, so he would not be without family. Yet the path he had chosen as an artist was one he go alone. He would never return to Europe. He stayed in Philadelphia for the next three years, supporting himself as a decorative painter. He spent more time on his own easel work which began to receive widening acclaim and awards. His journey as an artist had begun.

The Imperial Hotel, London

After a ten day ocean voyage, Ben Solowey landed in London on June 22, 1924. Ten years earlier he had left the continent as a 14-year-old teenager with his family who were escaping pogroms and forced conscription in St Peterburg, Russia. He knew no English, nor was his education up to American standards. The family landed in Philadelphia where they had family, where Ben started the process of becoming an American .

Although placed into a kindergarten class at the age of 14, within a year, he was up to his peers, and already speaking fairly fluent English. He took whatever free art classes he could at the Graphic Sketch Club. His efforts were rewarded when at the age of 19 his painting won the first prize at the Club (as judged by Edward Redfield and Alice Kent Stoddard) which for this competition was a full three-year scholarship to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

At the Academy he went through the school’s rigorous classical arts education, yet many of his teachers were

Ben Solowey in London, June 22, 1924.

the best modern artists in the region including Arthur B. Carles and Hugh Breckenridge. The classical and the modern would weave their way into all of Ben’s art, as he forged ahead on his own self-directed path.

He, and his friend and sometimes roommate, Bill Schulhoff spent their first nights in the Old World at the Imperial Hotel. whose architectural style was a mixture of Art Nouveau Tudor and Art Nouveau Gothic, combining terra-cotta ornaments in which the corbels, gargoyles and statues were modelled with red brick. Towers rose above a high mansard roof of green copper. A Winter Garden occupied the ground floor between the two bedroom wings. Both Winter Garden and Turkish baths were decorated in glazed Doulton ware.

Ben would not stay long before heading to his real destination: Paris.

Postcard of SS Leviathan from Ben Solowey’s collection.

Ben Solowey won many awards while enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Right from the start, his Ramborger Award-winning drawing of an Academy charwoman was reproduced in the school’s catalogue in his sophomore year. Nevertheless, he did not win a Cresson scholarship, which provided at least $1,000 for study abroad.

Undaunted, he got a copy of the Cresson checklist, and had it annotated by someone who had previously gone before and got a job as steward on the SS Leviathan, one of the largest and fastest cruise liners in the world.

The Leviathan had been built as the SS Vaterland in 1913 for the German Hamburg American Line, which incidentally was the same shipping line that Ben had come to America only ten years earlier from Russia. When World War I broke out, the Vaterland was docked in the neutral United States. When the U. S. entered the war in 1917, the Hamburg American’s Hoboken facility was seized by the American government and retrofitted as a troop ship that would eventually have a capacity of housing 14,000 troops. Its fast speed allowed it to crisscross the Atlantic without escort ships.

After the war, with a government surplus of ships, the vessel was leased to the United Staes Line who modernized the ship. The decorations and fittings, designed by New York architects Walker & Gillette, retained much of their prewar splendor of Edwardian, Georgian, and Louis XVI styles. They now merged with modern 1920s touches. The biggest deviation was an art deco night club supplanting the original Verandah Café. It returned to transporting civilians in 1923 to and from Europe for a minimum of five Atlantic voyages per year.

Although he traveled in third class, Ben spent his days crossing the Atlantic is the nicer parts of the ship. It made for a stylish arrival for the young artist to Europe.