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Sir Lawrence (Laurens) Alma-Tadema, 1839-1912

A Dedication to Bacchus, 1889

"Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's sunny visions of Roman luxury offered the Victorians a beguilind fantasy, an escape from darkest London, from fogs and social problems, from constricting dress and rigid social codes. Looking at these paintings, the Victorians were transported into a seemingly realistic world of filmy draperies and clear blue skies, where toga-clad senators debatred the merits of a vase or bronze statuette, where girls bathed beneath lofty architectural faults or idled on white marble benches overlooking the sea. So popular was his work during his lifetime, so compelling was this vision of the past, that according to the Dictionary of National biography 'no public gallery of any importance in Europe, America or Australia is without at least one example of his handiwork, nor can any private collection of modern art be deemed representative which has nothing of his to show.'" Julian Trauherz, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, p. 11.


Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema received his fame (and knighthood) from his adopted country, Victorian England, but grew up in the Academic traditions of Holland and Belgium. Born in Dronrijp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in England in 1870. His paintings are noted for fine detail, smooth finish, and the realistic representations of textures. Most of his works depict evocative settings in ancient Rome, Greece, or medieval France. He joined the Royal Academy in 1879 and was knighted in 1899 and was foremost among the school soon to be known as the Victorian Classicists.

Early Career


Although he lived most of his life in England, Alma-Tadema was born Lorens Alma Tadema in the small village of Dronrijp in the Netherlands. His father was a successful Notary and it was determined that the son would also be an attorney. After several teenage years in which the young Tadema tried both to dutifully study for the Bar and to paint, he apparently suffered the equivalent of a physical breakdown. As he was thought likely to die from consumption/Tuberculosis, his parents agreed to let him paint as he so desperately desired. Tadema recovered and, in 1851, began art studies at the Antwerp Academy, influenced by Gustave Wappers and Nicaise de Keyser. He left the Academy in 1856 and continued to study art while carefully immersing himself in the history of Germany, early France, and Belgium under Louis de Taye, a professor of Archeology. Taye, a minor painter, taught history and historical costume at the Academy of Antwerp and demanded a rigorous approach to attaining archeological accuracy in art.



From the first, Tadema showed a determination to fuse the most meticulous historical and archeologal research with his art. In 1859 the twenty-three-year-old Alma-Tadema became a pupil of the Baron Henri Leys in his Antwerp Studio. Leys was a famous painter of his day, specialized in 16th-century Flemish historical subjects in a deliberately archaizing style full of convincing detail. Tadema assisted Leys as an apprentice painting the famous murals of the Antwerp Town Hall. From Leys, Tadema learned "the need for absolute accuracy, the need to understand a thing thoroughly to be able to paint it, and the willingness to reject unsatisfactory work...Such perfectionism was foreign to most English painters, whose artistic education lacked the rigours of continental academic technique or the discipline of apprenticeship."

In 1861, Tadema's picture "The Education of the Children of Clovis" (1868) was exhibited and became a critical success. He might well have continued to follow Leys' direction for Continental medieval subjects but for a providential event . . . his first visits in 1863 to Rome, Florence, Naples and Pompeii while on his honeymoon with Marie de Boisgirard, his French wife.

Tadema was overwhelmed with Pompeii and the vanished everday classical world it represented. He obsessively sketched every detail of the ruins, spent days in the Museum in Naples studying recovered artifacts, and bought as many of them as he could to provide actual models for future sketches. From now on, his sights were firmly fixed on recreating on modern canvas what he saw as a golden age of classical Rome.

The Sculpture Gallery,, 1867.



A second, critical event in this same period was Tadema's meeting in 1864 with the art dealer Ernest Gambert, who would provide him what every young artist most required - a canny art marketer to establish his works in the public eye. Gambert helped persuade the artist to use his middle name of Alma, hyphenated as Alma-Tadema, so that his works would show up first, not last, in gallery catalogues. Over their long association, Gambert and his successors would help make Alma-Tadema an artistic household name.

Receiving increasing critical attention, Alma-Tadema lived in Brussels from 1865-70 but finally moved to London in that year, to improve his health and following the death of his first wife. His The Phyrric Dance was a sensation in 1869. But Alma-Tadema was also canny enough to know where his paintings would receive the greatest acclaim. Although his style of historical genre painting set in the ancient world was popular in Europe, it was largely unknown in Britain at the time. His disciplined and scholarly detail and his almost photographic imagery was also unknown to a generation raised on the poetry and imagination of the Pre-Raphaelites or the stagy, inauthentic English historical painters such as William Powell Frith or Edward Matthew Ward. His intense study of archeological artifacts and his constant research on even the most minor detail of a painting led to his ability to create a "window into the past" with his works which was as unusual as it was increasingly sought-after. The Victorian English, suffering from the woes of their Empire, the Industrial Revolution and its own financial success, were particularly vulnerable to the escapism of art set in a happier, older world.

While in London, Alma-Tadema remarried and happily set down to paint innumerable scenes of Roman and Greek life, foraying into Ancient Egypt, all characterized by a pre-Industrial vividness and acute historical accuracy. His works included A Vintage Festival, A Reading from Homer, The Roses of Heliogabolus and others too innumerable to name. He was naturalized an English citizen in 1873. He exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy, becoming an Associate Member in 1876 and a full Royal Academician in 1879. He was a social lion, whose regular society evenings with all the major painters of his day were legendary for an almost Roman conviviality and excess. His influence can be seen on almost every member of the British Classicists generation.

A Roman Emperor, AD 41


Alma-Tadema progressed from success to success. Although some critics complained that his work was merely "Victorians in togas," or noted that he seldom chose scenes of dark drama but rather the everyday images of peaceful life, the artist could paint dramatically when he chose (as in the above, the image of a terrified Claudius, caught by the Praetorian Guard hiding behind a palace curtain after the murder of his nephew, Caligula). But by and large, Alma-Tadema was interested in the beauty of his art, not its significance. Nor was he unaffected by the Victorian conventions that forbade conveying violence, or open sexuality. His Rome is a city without prostitutes, murderers, screaming mobs, or sexual decadence, true to the temper of his times.

Ave Caesar, Io Saturnalia! 1880

By the 1890's, Alma-Tadema was wealthy, famous, and an insider in the British art establishment. He was knighted in 1899, awarded the Order of Merit in 1905, and the Royal Institute of British Architects Gold Medal in 1906. When he died in 1912, he was buried with other great artists of his age in St. Paul's Cathedral in London. He was acknowledged by archeologists as a master technician whose understanding of ancient artifacts was unrivaled in the artistic world.




During his sixty productive years Tadema produced over 400 known paintings (numbering each one in Roman numerals) and had some success designing musical instruments as well. In 1980 a piano he designed for Henry Marquand of New York made 177,273 pounds at auction, making it to date not only the most expensive such musical instrument ever sold, but also the most costly example of 19th-century applied art). He largely designed his own homes in an eccentric but somehow comfortable blend of Gothic and Classical influences.


Being a creature of his time, when the Victorian period ended so did Alma-Tadema's marketability. His influence had been declining in the rebellious atmosphere of the new 20th century, with artists like Picasso and the late Impressionists bringing a cynical worldview to popular art. The horrors of the First World War, and the fashion in the 1920's for surrealistic and abstract art, completed Alma-Tadema's fall from popular favor, in which he was not alone: the Classicist painters, symbolizing a vanished Victorian complacency, all suffered a significant decline in popularity. His paintings, which once would have sold for 10,000 pounds a few years earlier, were practically impossible to sell at all. In fact, some of Alma-Tadema's paintings could have been had for as little as 20 pounds after his death in 1912. His friendships with the Prince of Wales (later, Edward VII) and the young Winston Churchill were forgotten and his artistic legacy almost vanished. In the bitterness of the post-war years, Alma-Tadema was singled out for abuse because of his very success in the world of Victorian certainties. His reputation had always suffered criticis, from Ruskin's judgment that he was "the worst painter of the 19th century" to later critics who declared that his paintings were "about worthy enough to adorn bourbon boxes". Twentieth century critics were no kinder. Alma-Tadema had come to represent the Victorians and the entire epoch was out of fashion.

Bacchanal, 1886

Alma-Tadema was consigned to relative obscurity for many years other than interest in his paintings in the new moviemaking technologies. It was not until 1973 that a biography of Alma-Tadema was printed (by Russell Ash) which strongly revived interest in his works. In 1990, a color book containing large prints of his ouevre of paintings was published, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema by Russell Ash. With the advent of the Web (where his works are strongly represented) and a retrospective return to appreciation of 19th century art, his reputation has, and continues to, revive.


One seldom noticed influence Tadema has had on modern art is the vision of the ancient world portrayed in such films as D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Ben Hur (1926), and Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). Jessie J. Laskey, co-writer on De Mille's The Ten Commandments has described how the producer would customarily spread out prints of Alma-Tadema paintings to indicate to his set designers the look he wanted to achieve. In fact, no artist has had so significant an influence on any popular art, as Alma-Tadema's scenes can be viewed again and again in the Hollywood Roman "epics"of the 1950's and 1960's.

Caralla and Geta, 1906



Sources:

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ed. Edwin Becker, Rizzoli, NY.

ARC Biography: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Webshots Gallery - Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Artmagick: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

John William Waterhouse

Sir Lawrence (Laurens) Alma-Tadema, 1839-1912

Jacques-Louis David: The Roman Revolution