Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, (8 January 1836 – 25 June 1912)
Alma-Tadema was among the most financially
successful painters of the Victorian era, though never matching Edwin Henry
Landseer. For over sixty years he gave his audience exactly what they wanted:
distinctive, elaborate paintings of beautiful people in classical settings. His
incredibly detailed reconstructions of ancient Rome , with languid men and women posed
against white marble in dazzling sunlight provided his audience with a glimpse
of a world of the kind they might one day construct for themselves at least in
attitude if not in detail. As with other painters, the reproduction rights for
prints were often worth more than the canvas, and a painting with its rights
still attached may have been sold to Gambart for £10,000 in 1874; without
rights it was sold again in 1903, when Alma-Tadema's prices were actually higher,
for £2,625. Typical prices were between £2,000 and £3,000 in the 1880s, but at
least three works sold for between £5,250 and £6,060 in the 1900s. Prices held
well until the general collapse of Victorian prices in the early 1920s, when
they fell to the hundreds, where they remained until the 1960s; by 1969 £4,600
had been reached again (the huge effect of inflation must of course be remembered
for all these figures).
His artistic legacy almost vanished. As
attitudes of the public in general and the artists in particular became more
sceptical of the possibilities of human achievement, his paintings were
increasingly denounced. He was declared "the worst painter of the 19th
century" by John Ruskin, and one critic even remarked that his paintings
were "about worthy enough to adorn bourbon boxes." After this brief
period of being actively derided, he was consigned to relative obscurity for
many years. Only since the 1960s has Alma-Tadema's work been re-evaluated for
its importance within the nineteenth century, and more specifically, within the
evolution of English art.
He is now regarded as one of the principal
classical-subject painters of the nineteenth century whose works demonstrate
the care and exactitude of an era mesmerised by trying to visualise the past,
some of which was being recovered through archaeological research.
Alma-Tadema's meticulous archaeological
research, including research into Roman architecture (which was so thorough
that every building featured in his canvases could have been built using Roman
tools and methods) led to his paintings being used as source material by
Hollywood directors in their vision of the ancient world for films such as D.
W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), Ben Hur (1926), Cleopatra (1934), and most
notably of all, Cecil B. DeMille's epic remake of The Ten Commandments (1956).
Indeed, Jesse Lasky Jr., the co-writer on The Ten Commandments, described how
the director would customarily spread out prints of Alma-Tadema paintings to
indicate to his set designers the look he wanted to achieve. The designers of
the Oscar-winning Roman epic Gladiator used the paintings of Alma-Tadema as a central
source of inspiration.
Terrific! Although a slightly more Romantic viewpoint than I would have preferred, the classical details are greatly appreciated.
ReplyDelete_ The Devoted Classicist
I personally like Tadema's paintings and they were very popular at the time although many regarded them soft porn.
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