Instead of focusing on the brazen dance of a bejeweled temptress or the adolescent's legendary blood lust, as so many contemporaries did, Ella Ferris Pell represents Salomé as an introspective figure. The embossed, silver platter that will soon receive her reward for pleasing King Herod, the severed head of John the Baptist, rests casually on her striped skirt. The artist gives her antiheroine an inscrutable expression and an almost ambivalent attitude. Pell rose to a prominent place in American art circles during the decades immediately following the Civil War. She had success showing numerous works at the Salon of 1889, and Salomé was one of two large paintings by Pell displayed at the 1890 Salon where it attracted favorable attention. Pell's Salomé is the first major oil painting by a woman artist to join the Timken's personal collection.