Lawrence Alma-Tadema

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Lawrence Alma-Tadema was born on the 8th of January 1836 in Dronryp, a village in the Dutch province of Friesland, and died one of the most celebrated and wealthy painters in the Victorian world. By the time he was knighted in 1899, his canvases of languid Romans reclining on sunlit marble terraces were selling for thousands of pounds apiece. Then, within a generation of his death, John Ruskin's verdict that he was "the worst painter of the 19th century" seemed to stick. His prices fell from thousands to the hundreds. His paintings gathered dust. One of his most celebrated works, The Finding of Moses, failed to sell at auction in 1960 even at its reserve price of £252. What does a painter do to deserve that fall? And how does a reputation climb back from that depth to a record of over thirty-five million dollars at Sotheby's New York?

• 2. A Childhood Reinvented

  ›

  Pieter Jiltes Tadema, the village notary of Dronryp, died when Lourens was four years old, leaving a mother with five children and a household that had already relocated to Leeuwarden in search of a better income. Hinke Dirks Brouwer, who had artistic leanings of her own, arranged for a local drawing master to give lessons to the older half-brothers in the family. Lourens sat in on those lessons too.

  The plan for the boy was a legal career. In 1851, at the age of fifteen, that plan collapsed when he suffered a physical and mental breakdown. Diagnosed as consumptive and given only a short time to live, he was allowed to spend what were expected to be his final days drawing and painting. He recovered instead, and walked away from law for good.

  In 1852 he entered the Royal Academy of Antwerp, where Gustaf Wappers oversaw his early training. During his four years as a registered student he won several awards. Before leaving the academy, towards the end of 1855, he became studio assistant to the painter and professor Louis Jan de Taeye, a position he held for three years. De Taeye introduced him to books on ancient civilisations and encouraged a rigorous commitment to historical accuracy that would define his entire career.

• 3. Egypt, Marble, and a Devastating Insult

  ›

  "Where else should I have begun as soon as I had become acquainted with the life of the ancients?" Alma-Tadema said of his early Egyptian paintings. "The first thing a child learns of ancient history is about the court of Pharaoh." His close study of Sir John Gardner Wilkinson's The Manners and Customs of Ancient Egyptians, published in 1837, gave those early canvases their precise rendering of objects and settings.

  When he left de Taeye's studio in November 1858, he began working with Baron Jan August Hendrik Leys, whose studio was among the most highly regarded in Belgium. Under Leys, Alma-Tadema painted his first major work, The Education of the Children of Clovis, in 1861. When it was exhibited at the Artistic Congress in Antwerp that year, it created a sensation among critics and artists. The painting was eventually purchased and given to King Leopold of Belgium.

  Leys's reaction to the finished canvas, however, was pointed: the treatment of marble in the painting, he said, resembled cheese. Alma-Tadema took the criticism with complete seriousness. He redirected his technique until he became, by wide acknowledgment, the world's foremost painter of marble and variegated granite. The nickname that followed him through his career was the "marbellous painter."

• 4. Love, Loss, and London

  ›

  On the 3rd of January 1863, Alma-Tadema's mother died. On the 24th of September that same year he married Marie-Pauline Gressin-Dumoulin de Boisgirard at Antwerp City Hall. Their honeymoon took them through Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii, and the ruins of Pompeii in particular seized him. There he met Geremia Discanno, an Italian painter commissioned by archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli to reproduce the brightly painted frescoes being uncovered at Pompeii and Herculaneum before they faded from exposure. Alma-Tadema consulted Discanno a number of times until Discanno's death in 1907.

  In the summer of 1864, the art dealer Ernest Gambart saw Alma-Tadema at work on Egyptian Chess Players and immediately recognised what he was looking at. Gambart gave him an order for twenty-four pictures and arranged for three of his paintings to be shown in London. It was the first decisive step toward an English audience.

  On the 28th of May 1869, Pauline died of smallpox at Schaerbeek in Belgium, at the age of thirty-two. Alma-Tadema ceased painting for nearly four months. That summer, doctors in Brussels were unable to diagnose his own illness; Gambart advised him to seek a second opinion in England. Shortly after arriving in London in December 1869, he was invited to the home of the painter Ford Madox Brown. There he met Laura Theresa Epps, who was seventeen years old.

  The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 gave him a final reason to leave the continent entirely. He arrived in London at the beginning of September with his two small daughters and his sister Artje. He proposed to Laura during a painting lesson. Her father objected; the couple married in July 1871. Laura, painting under her married name, built a reputation of her own and appears in numerous of his canvases after their marriage.

• 5. The Workshop Behind the Marble

  ›

  The Roses of Heliogabalus, completed in 1888, depicts the Roman emperor Elagabalus suffocating his guests under a cascade of rose petals at an orgy. To get the blossoms right, Alma-Tadema had fresh roses sent weekly to his London studio from the French Riviera for four months during the winter of 1887-1888. This was not eccentricity. It was his standard operating procedure.

  From early in his career he painted objects directly from museum collections, including the British Museum. He amassed an enormous archive of photographs taken at ancient sites in Italy, which he drew on for precise architectural detail. A journey on the continent in the early 1870s, lasting five and a half months, took him through Brussels, Germany, and Italy, where he purchased photographs of ruins that became part of this growing collection. In January 1876, he rented a studio in Rome to study the sites more closely. He returned to Rome and Pompeii in 1883, spending days at a time on-site.

  His perfectionism ran through every part of the process. One story describes a finished canvas he was unhappy with: he gave it to a maid to use as a table cover. In 1872 he developed a system of opus numbers, assigning every painting a sequential identifier beginning from his earliest work. Portrait of my sister, Artje, painted in 1851, was catalogued as Opus I. The system made it harder for forgeries to circulate undetected. Two months before his death he completed Preparations in the Coliseum, catalogued as Opus CCCCVIII.

• 6. Rise, Fall, and the Hollywood Afterlife

  ›

  Alma-Tadema's prices in the 1880s typically ran between £2,000 and £3,000 per canvas, with at least three works selling for between £5,250 and £6,060 in the 1900s. A painting together with its reproduction rights might fetch £10,000 in 1874; reproduction rights for prints were often worth more than the canvas itself. Prices held until the general collapse of the market for Victorian art in the early 1920s, when they fell to the hundreds.

  As his pupil John Collier put it, "it is impossible to reconcile the art of Alma-Tadema with that of Matisse, Gauguin and Picasso." The rise of Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, and Futurism left his meticulous reconstructions of antiquity looking like relics of a different century's ambitions. One critic suggested his paintings were "about worthy enough to adorn bourbon boxes."

  But his paintings kept working in a different medium. D. W. Griffith's Intolerance in 1916, Ben-Hur in 1926, and Cleopatra in 1934 all drew on his imagery. Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments in 1956 used Alma-Tadema prints directly: co-writer Jesse Lasky Jr. described the director spreading them out as guides for his set designers. The design team behind the Oscar-winning Gladiator in 2000 took its main visual inspiration from his paintings. The interior of Cair Paravel castle in The Chronicles of Narnia in 2005 followed the same source.

  In 1962, New York art dealer Robert Isaacson mounted the first exhibition of Alma-Tadema's work in fifty years. Allen Funt, the creator of Candid Camera, assembled thirty-five of his paintings during the nadir of his reputation, roughly ten percent of total output. After Funt was robbed by his accountant, he was forced to sell the collection at Sotheby's London in November 1973. The Finding of Moses, which had failed to sell at £252 in 1960, was auctioned at Christie's New York in May 1995 for £1.75 million. On the 4th of November 2010 it sold again at Sotheby's New York for $35,922,500, setting a new record for any Victorian artist.