Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912-), Dutch-born Victorian painter renowned for his exquisitely detailed depictions of everyday life in the ancient Greco-Roman world.
His work was immensely popular during his lifetime for its lavish, romantic vision of antiquity, influencing later art and even early Hollywood epics
Alma-Tadema, the son of a Dutch notary, studied art at the Antwerp Academy (1852-58) under the Belgian historical painter Hendrik Leys, assisting the painter in 1859 with frescoes for the Stadhuis (town hall) in Antwerp.
During a visit to Italy in 1863, Alma-Tadema became interested in Greek and Roman antiquity and Egyptian archaeology, and afterward he depicted imagery almost exclusively from those sources.
Moving to England, he became a naturalized British subject in 1873 and was elected a member of the Royal Academy in 1879. He was knighted in 1899.
Alma-Tadema excelled at the accurate re-creation of ancient architecture and costumes and the precise depiction of textures of marble, bronze, and silk.
His expert rendering of settings provides a backdrop for anecdotal scenes set in the ancient world. Alma-Tadema’s wife, Laura Epps, was also a painter. | Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, the painter of "Victorians in togas", was one of the most successful artists of the XIX century. He was internationally famous and so immensely popular that scarcely a middle-class Victorian drawing room was without at least one print of Alma-Tadema's painting. Yet a few years after his death he was all but forgotten.
Laurens (later he changed to the more English Lawrence) Tadema was born on 8 January 1836, in the small village of Dronrijp, which lies about 3 miles to the west of Leeuwarden, Holland.
He was the sixth child of Pieter Jiltes Tadema, a notary.
It is unclear when and why he affixed the name Alma to his last name, probably it was the name of his godfather.
His parents wanted him to become a lawyer and Laurens was enrolled at the gymnasium of Leeuwarden.
Although Laurens was a good student, he always wanted to be an artist and, with great enthusiasm he tried to pursue both courses. This caused a significant decline of his health that his doctors even predicted he would die shortly.
His mother decided to allow him to spend his remaining days doing what he enjoyed most, to paint. But happily after that he recovered completely.
This marked the beginning of a new period of his life.
In 1851, he went to Antwerp to study in the Antwerp Academy, where he was taught first by Gustave Wappers and then by Nicaise de Keyser.
He left the Academy in 1856 and continued to study art and also took up the history of Germany, early France and Belgium under the guidance of Louis de Taye, the Professor of Archaeology at the Academy of Antwerp.
Faust and Marguerite (1857) was painted as a result of these studies.
n 1859 Alma-Tadema became a pupil of Henrik Leys, joining his studio in Antwerp. In 1861, Tadema's picture The Education of the Children of Clovis (1868) was exhibited and became a success.
In 1862, Alma-Tadema left Leys's studio and started his own career. The period 1862-1870 is called his Continental period, he established himself as a significant contemporary European artist.
His main works were of classical genre, dedicated to Ancient Egypt: An Egyptian Widow (1872) and Greek and Roman history: A Roman Family (1868), An Audience at Agrippa's (1876).
In 1870, Alma-Tadema moved to England, where he was to spend the rest of his life.
He became one of the most famous and highly paid artists of his time, acknowledged and rewarded by the fellow artists as well as by the governments of the European countries.
In 1879, he was elected as a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts and in 1899 was knighted by Queen Victoria.
Among his most famous works are An Apodyterium (1886), Spring (1894), The Coliseum (1896), The Baths of Caracalla (1899), Silver Favourites (1903), The Finding of Moses (1904), A Favourite Custom (1909).
Alma-Tadema died in 1912.
Style
Alma-Tadema's works are remarkable for the way in which flowers, textures and hard reflecting substances, like metals, pottery, and especially marble, are painted – indeed, his realistic depiction of marble led him to be called the 'marbellous painter'.
His work shows much of the fine execution and brilliant colour of the old Dutch masters.
From early in his career, Alma-Tadema was particularly concerned with architectural accuracy, often including objects that he saw at museums – such as the British Museum in London – in his works. He also read many books and took many images from them. He amassed an enormous number of photographs from ancient sites in Italy, which he used to achieve the most precise accuracy in the detail of his compositions.
Alma-Tadema was a perfectionist.
He worked assiduously to make the most of his paintings, often repeatedly reworking parts of paintings before he found them satisfactory to his own high standards. One story relates that one of his paintings was rejected and instead of keeping it, he gave the canvas to a maid who used it as her table cover.
He was sensitive to every detail and architectural line of his paintings, as well as the settings he was depicting.
For many of the objects in his paintings, he would depict what was in front of him, using fresh flowers imported from across the continent and even from Africa, rushing to finish the paintings before the flowers died.
It was this commitment to veracity that earned him recognition but also caused many of his critics to adopt negative attitudes towards his almost encyclopaedic works.
Alma-Tadema's work has been linked with that of European Symbolist painters.
As an artist of international reputation, he can be cited as an influence on European figures such as Gustav Klimt and Fernand Khnopff.
Both painters incorporate classical motifs into their works and use Alma-Tadema's unconventional compositional devices such as abrupt cut-off at the edge of the canvas. They, like Alma-Tadema, also employ coded imagery to convey meaning in their paintings. | Source: © Wikipedia
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