ALMA TADEMA

A Favourite Custom	Her Eyes are with her Thoughts	In the Tepidarium	Pandora	Promise of Spring	Silver Favourites
Spring in the Gardens of the Villa Borghese	The Coliseum	The Favourite Poet	The Roses of Heliogabalus	Unconscious Rivals	Welcome Footsteps

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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

January 8, 1836 – June 25, 1912

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Biography

Born at Dronrijp, a Frisian village near Leeuwarden, he was the son of Pieter Tadema, a notary, who died when Lawrence was only four years old. Alma was the name of his godfather. His mother (d. 1863) was his father's second wife, and was left with a large family. It was designed that the boy should follow his father's profession; but he had so great a leaning towards art that he was eventually sent to Antwerp, where in 1852 he entered the academy under Egide Charles Gustave Wappers. Thence he passed to the atelier of Jan August Hendrik Leys. In 1859 he assisted Leys in the latter's frescoes in the hall of the hotel de ville at Antwerp. In the exhibition of Alma-Tadema's collected works at the Grosvenor Gallery in London in the winter of 1882-1883 were two pictures which may be said to mark the beginning and end of his first period. These were a portrait of himself, dated 1852, and "A Bargain," painted Alma-Tadema in 1860.

His first great success was a picture of The Education of the Children of Clovis (1861), which was exhibited at Antwerp. In the following year he received his first gold medal at Amsterdam. The Education of the Children of Clovis (three young children of Clovis and Clotilde practicing the art of hurling the ax in the presence of their widowed mother, who is training them to avenge the murder of their own parent) was one of a series of Merovingian pictures, of which the finest was the Fredegonda of 1878 (exhibited in 1880), where the dejected wife or mistress is watching from behind her curtain window the marriage of Chilperic I with Galeswintha. It is perhaps in this series that we find the painter moved by the deepest feeling and the strongest spirit of romance. One of the most passionate of all is Fredegonda at the Death-bed of Praetextatus, in which the bishop, stabbed by order of the queen, is cursing her from his dying bed.

One of his most famous paintings was The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) - based on an episode from the life of the infamously debauched Roman Emperor Elagabalus (Heliogabalus) - An Earthly Paradise (1891), and Spring (1894). Most of his other pictures have been small canvasses of exquisite finish, like the Gold-fish of 1900.

These, as well as all his 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 'marbelous painter'. His work shows much of the fine execution and brilliant colour of the old Dutch masters. By the human interest with which he imbues all his scenes from ancient life he brings them within the scope of modern feeling, and charms us with gentle sentiment and playful humour.

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