Short answers, pulled from the story.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema was a Dutch-born British painter who lived from the 8th of January 1836 to the 28th of June 1912. He was known for meticulous, archaeologically researched depictions of ancient Rome and Egypt, particularly scenes of marble terraces, languid figures in classical settings, and vivid flower-filled compositions.
Alma-Tadema was born in Dronryp, in the Dutch province of Friesland. He trained at the Royal Academy of Antwerp in Belgium, where he studied under Gustaf Wappers, before eventually settling in London in 1870.
The rise of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism made his detailed reconstructions of antiquity appear outdated. John Ruskin declared him "the worst painter of the 19th century," and the broader market for Victorian art collapsed in the early 1920s, pushing prices from thousands of pounds to the hundreds.
The Finding of Moses, painted in 1904, sold for $35,922,500 at Sotheby's New York on the 4th of November 2010, setting a record for any Victorian artist. The same painting had failed to meet its reserve of £252 at a 1960 auction.
Hollywood directors drew on Alma-Tadema's archaeologically detailed paintings as visual references for ancient-world productions including D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Ben-Hur (1926), and Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956), for which co-writer Jesse Lasky Jr. described DeMille spreading out Alma-Tadema prints to guide set designers. The Oscar-winning Gladiator (2000) also took its main visual inspiration from his paintings.
Starting in 1872, Alma-Tadema assigned a sequential opus number to every painting he produced, including his earlier works. His earliest painting, Portrait of my sister, Artje from 1851, was numbered Opus I. His final major work, Preparations in the Coliseum, completed two months before his death in 1912, was Opus CCCCVIII. The system was designed to make it harder for forgeries to circulate.