Background
He was born in the Netherlands but moved with his family to England when he was 5 years old and became a naturalised citizen.
He was born in the Netherlands but moved with his family to England when he was 5 years old and became a naturalised citizen.
He studied at London County Council Schools, the People's Palace, Toynbee Hall, Central School of Art and at the LCC School of Photoengraving and Lithography at Bolt Court where he met Edmund Blampied, Robert Charles Peter and John Nicolson, all fellow etchers.
He added the accent to become van Abbé. Salomon van Abbé was noted for his drypoints of the legal profession and the law. In the 1911 Census in the United Kingdom the van Abbé family gave their surname as "Abbey".
Salomon van Abbé also used the pseudonym ‘C. Morse’ because of problems with publishers.
Much of his commercial work was to design the dust jackets for books, and he worked for publishers such as Ward Lock & Company, Collins, Thomas Nelson, Thornton Butterworth, Methuen, John Murray, Skeffingtons, Hamish Hamilton, Nash and Grayson and Herbert Jenkins. Because his work for publishers was so prolific he designed the dust jackets of many notable books published in the 1920s and ‘30s, including the first "Saint" book by Leslie Charteris called Meet the Tiger (Ward Lock, 1928), The Mystery of the Blue Train by Agatha Christie (Collins, 1928) and the first two novels by Dorothy L. Sayers published by T. Fisher Unwin.
Salomon van Abbé married Hannah Wolff (b 1892, d 1973) on 3 August 1914 at Stoke Newington in London, and they had two sons, Derek (b 1917, d 1982) and Norman (b 1921, d 2003). van Abbé has paintings in National collections in the United Kingdom.
He was elected an Associate of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers (ARE) in 1923 and was a member of the Royal Society of British Artists (RBA).