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On January 8, 1836, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was born Laurens Tadema in Dronrijp, a small village located in northern Holland. The youngest of six children, Alma-Tadema began taking drawing lessons at an early age, with the encouragement of his widowed mother. Although intended to become a lawyer, he was allowed to take up art in earnest after suffering a breakdown at fifteen and being given only a short time to live. A year later, having recovered, he entered the Royal Academy of Antwerp, studying under Egide Charles Gustave Wappers and becoming an assistant to Lodewijk Jan de Taeye, who influenced him to use historical subjects. His first major work, The Education of the Children of Clovis, which he completed in 1861, was well-received after being exhibited at Antwerp’s Artistic Congress and formed the basis of his future reputation.

 

Initially, Alma-Tadema continued to work with themes based on the lives of the Merovingians, but then began painting scenes from ancient Egypt, which proved to be more popular. In 1863, he married Marie-Pauline Gressin, the daughter of a journalist, and the couple spent their honeymoon in Florence, Rome, Naples, and Pompeii. After seeing Italy for the first time, he changed his choice of subject matter yet again as he became highly interested in depicting the classical world, and his “Roman” paintings were ultimately those for which he was best known. Sadly, in the May of 1869, Marie-Pauline died of smallpox, leaving her husband inconsolable, and later that year his health deteriorated. Traveling to England in the hope of receiving better medical attention, he met and fell in love with an artistic young woman named Laura Epps; his feelings for her, combined with his concern over the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, caused him to move to London in 1870. The two were wed, and Alma-Tadema grew to be increasingly popular and successful among the English, eventually becoming a naturalized British citizen.

 

Accompanied by Laura, he continued to travel throughout the Continent, revisting Italy to view ruins there and to gain further inspiration for his art. Although the number of paintings he produced gradually decreased, he remained active, receiving many awards and being knighted in 1899. Even in the later stages of his career, he executed such ambitious works as The Finding of Moses, one of his few biblical scenes; he became involved in theatrical productions, and began to design furniture, clothing, and textiles. However, in 1909, his second wife passed away, and he was to outlive her by fewer than three years. Having gone to a spa in Wiesbaden, Germany to be treated for stomach ulcers, he died there on June 28, 1912, at the age of seventy-six, and was buried in London’s St. Paul’s cathedral.

 

Alma-Tadema was highly regarded during his lifetime. He possessed a talent for arranging the elements of his compositions in order to make them appealing to the eye, and for capturing details; his technique when painting marble was particularly admired. Despite this, his reputation quickly detriorated following his death. Many labeled his works as nothing more than pictures of “Victorians in togas,” and famed art critic John Ruskin went so far as to refer to him as the worst painter of the nineteenth century. However, after many years of first being derided and then left in obscurity, in the early 1970s Alma-Tadema’s paintings finally began to be recognized once again for what they truly were: skillful and accurate depictions of a long-vanished world that continues to attract the modern imagination. From the court of Clovis to the shores of the Mediterranean, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema beautifully illustrated a combination of realism and romance.

 

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