Solomon White was a Cincinnati artist. How good was he? He was so good, people thought objects he painted were real.



For the 1903 Cincinnati Fall Festival – a sort of predecessor to Oktoberfest – White was hired to paint a big tent to look like an English-style pub. The “White Horse Inn” was an elaborate refreshment stand in Washington Park, and Solomon White outdid himself. According to the Cincinnati Enquirer [23 August 1903]:

“An amusing incident occurred yesterday which shows how realistic is the work of Sol White, who is painting much of this scenery. He had just finished painting a part of the side of the White Horse Inn, on which he had painted a bench to look as if it had been built onto the side of the house, when some of the other workmen came up looking for a place to put their tools. They thought the bench would do and attempted to place them on there, but were much surprised to find them on the floor.”

The Cincinnati Post [31 August 1903] agreed that Sol White’s skills were formidable:

“The ‘White Horse Inn,’ located in Washington Park, presents a very striking appearance. Though it is constructed almost entirely of painted canvas, the artist has done his work so thoroughly that it looks perfectly real.”

Cincinnatians were quite familiar with the work of Solomon White. For more than four decades, from around 1870 until his death in 1912, he contributed scenic backgrounds for several of Cincinnati’s theaters. In addition, he was in demand as a portrait artist and committed to canvas the likenesses of some of the city’s leading citizens.

This is rather unusual because, at that time, few white people would allow a black man to paint their portraits, and Solomon White was African American.

He was the oldest child born in Kentucky to Jackson and Mahaly White. Although Kentucky was a slave state in 1841 when Solomon was born, all indications are that his family were free people of color. The 1860 census shows the White family as free and living in Lexington, Kentucky, where Jackson worked as a “feather renovator,” who cleaned feathers for use in mattresses, pillows and the like.

Solomon arrived in Cincinnati shortly thereafter and appears to have worked odd jobs before setting up shop as a scenic artist. In 1873, he married Mary Jane Martin and they set up housekeeping in the West End, but not for long.

By the mid-1870s, the White family was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Solomon was engaged to decorate the opera house and to contribute large decorative murals to a triumphal arch erected to celebrate the United States centennial in 1876. Each of the four murals for the arch were eight feet by twelve feet in size. Around this time, he painted murals for a church in Parnell, Michigan, and a music center in Chicago.

In Cincinnati, White provided murals and scenery for Robinson’s Opera House on Plum Street, for the Freeman’s Theater on Central Avenue, for the Ludlow, Kentucky, Lagoon pavilions and for theatrical touring companies based in Cincinnati. Among the portraits he painted in Cincinnati was that of Frank A. Tucker of the Board of Public Works – a highly placed official in the city administration.

Unless some of Solomon White’s portraits survive, it is possible that his entire artistic output may have been destroyed. None of the theaters for which White painted frescos still exist. Indications are that his church murals were painted over or demolished. The theatrical backdrops on which so much of his reputation depends were ephemeral and probably repainted for the next show.

Even Solomon White’s literary output has vanished. He wrote at least one play. A story in the Cincinnati Post [23 June 1898] has this to say:

“When [Lt. General José Antonio de la Caridad] Maceo [y Grajales second-in-command of the Cuban Army of Independence] was betrayed and murdered Sol White, scenic artist, a colored man who has painted the scenery for the theater on Central Avenue ever since John Havlin took hold of it, began to write a drama, using that episode as foundation. Subsequent stirring events of the war interfered with working out of the plot – it had to be changed so often – but now it has been molded to a comedy-drama, called ‘At The Gates of Havana.’”

No copies of this play – if it was ever printed – seem to have survived.

It was art that killed Solomon White. All of that theatrical scenery would have required a lot of green paint, and green paint killed Solomon White on 5 February 1912. The most brilliant green colors throughout the Nineteenth Century used arsenic-based pigments, and it was chronic arsenic poisoning that precipitated White’s death.

In the century since he died, the chronic ravages of time devoured our memory of him.

Does anyone know if any Solomon White paintings are on display anywhere?