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.
