Chapter I: Part 1

[Frontispiece: AN EARTHLY PARADISE. ("ALL THE HEAVENS OF HEAVEN IN ONE LITTLE CHILD.")]

Bell's Miniature Series of Painters

SIR LAWRENCE
ALMA TADEMA

R. A.

BY

HELEN ZIMMERN

LONDON
GEORGE BELL & SONS
1902

CHISWICK PRESS: CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO.
TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Life of the Artist

The Work of Alma Tadema

The Art of Alma Tadema

Our Illustrations

List of the Principal Pictures by Alma Tadema, with Owners' Names

List of the Principal Portraits painted by Alma Tadema

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

An Earthly Paradise. ("All the Heavens of Heaven in one little child") _Frontispiece_

A Reading from Homer

At the Shrine of Venus

"Ave Caesar! Iò Saturnalia!"

Spring

An Audience at Agrippa's

Sappho

The Coliseum

All the illustrations are reproduced by special permission
of the Berlin Photographic Company.

LIFE OF
SIR LAWRENCE ALMA TADEMA

Laurens Alma Tadema was born on January 8th, 1836, at Dronryp, a little town in the very heart of the Frisian province of Holland. Hence by birth Tadema is Dutch, though by residence and naturalization he is now an Englishman. His Dutch birth, as we shall see later, was not without significant effect upon the development and character of his art. The father, Pieter Tadema, was an intelligent lawyer with a pronounced taste for music. Unfortunately, while the young Laurens was still a baby, this parent died, and his education and upbringing were left entirely in the hands of the mother. A woman of unusual capacity, she found herself at an early age with four children upon her hands--two, a girl and our painter, being her own offspring, and two her husband's by a previous marriage. The means at her disposal were small; but undaunted, she put herself to fight single-handed the battle of life, and with such success, that by her unassisted efforts she was able to place all her children well. Laurens, her youngest, was also something of her darling, and even as a child he realized all his mother was doing on her children's behalf. To her early example no doubt are due his great powers of perseverance, his undaunted application, his high-minded sense of duty.

From the very first his favourite plaything was a pencil and paper; he drew as by instinct. A family tradition survives to the effect that before he was five years old, Laurens had corrected an error in a drawing-master's design. Nature herself, therefore, seems to have pointed out his future career. But so the mother and guardians did not think. Art was regarded in those days as a profession which savoured of a discreditable character, and certainly not as one that could be rendered lucrative. It was therefore resolved that Laurens should follow in his father's footsteps.

This choice he found irksome to the last degree, and irksome, too, were the preliminary steps. For the dead languages he had no taste, for all dry-bone studies he had little use. His spare hours, and often his lesson hours too, were spent in drawing, and many a time he would have himself awakened before daybreak in order that he might devote the hours before school time to working at his favourite pastime. He had no masters and little encouragement, nevertheless he plodded on, and with such good results that already, in 1851, he was able to exhibit in a Dutch gallery a portrait he had painted of his sister, a work that even in its immaturity betrays some of the qualities that distinguish his later and greater efforts in this department.

But the dual effort imposed on this young soul by the fight between duty and inclination was too heavy a physical burden for the juvenile shoulders to bear. A collapse of health occurred just as Laurens was growing up, and so serious did it seem that the doctors told the mother and guardians how, seeing the young man was not long for this world, it seemed needless to mar his few remaining months of existence by forcing him to continue his hated legal studies. For this short period at least he might be allowed to be happy following his bent. But what was the surprise of doctors and guardians when Laurens, as soon as the heavy strain was removed, recovered as though by magic, and rapidly became the sturdy, robust man he has remained all his life.

It was now at last evident to those in authority that Tadema was a genius whose advance must not be thwarted or coerced; art, therefore, was reluctantly acknowledged to be his proper profession, and to prepare himself for this he sought admission to an art academy.

Strange, nay almost incredible though it sounds, he could gain no admission to those of his native land. Antwerp, at that time a noted artistic centre, proved more discerning and less inhospitable. It chanced that Tadema entered at a moment when the rival claims of French pseudo-classicism and Belgian naturalism were dividing the Academy into factions.

The one, the Pseudo-classic, was headed by Louis David, who at that time was living in Antwerp in exile. The other, called the Belgian-Flemish School, aimed at reviving the ancient local art of the Low Countries. Alma Tadema was not made of the stuff to become a pseudo-classic or a pseudo anything. It was, therefore, quite natural that the young student ranged himself at once with those who sought to revive the best traditions of the Dutch and Flemish schools. This native section was led by Wappers, and Tadema soon became one of his most enthusiastic partisans.

A friend who knew him in those days has said, "Tadema did not work at Antwerp, he slaved in his efforts to make up for all the precious time that had been lost." Of his early efforts, however, none have survived. Tadema has no severer critic than Tadema himself, and to this day he will not allow a picture to leave his studio until he has made it as perfect as he knows how, so that he mercilessly destroyed all his tentative canvases that could not yet reproduce the perfected ideals of the master. Even in those early days the subjects belonged either to history proper or that ancient history which is half enveloped in myth.

It was about this time that Tadema added the prefix Alma to the paternal surname. Alma was the name of his godfather, and such a proceeding was, it seems, not unusual in Holland. Tadema's reason for taking this step was that in this wise his name in artistic catalogues was ranged among the A's instead of further down among the T's. Undoubtedly such apparent trifles do prove of consequence in helping or hindering a career.

From the Academy of Antwerp Alma Tadema passed into the studio of Hendrick van Leys, the great Belgian archæologist and historical painter; his teaching, coming at the moment it did, proved of great value to Alma Tadema. Van Leys was just then busy decorating the Grand Town Hall of Antwerp with frescoes. In this work Alma Tadema was allowed to assist the master, and while so doing the young artist gained knowledge that proved of immense importance to his own after career. To van Leys' influence he owes his own historical accuracy and his attention to detail even the most minute. It also helped him to see objects truthfully and, what is equally important, to see them in mass. It is true that for a time van Leys' example was somewhat pernicious, since some of Alma Tadema's works of the period are visibly influenced by his master's dryness and harshness of execution. But the young man's own native bias toward rich and full colour was too strong for any influence long to repress the remarkable and idiosyncratic capacity that throbbed within him and was yearning to find full expression.

The subjects treated by van Leys in the Antwerp Guildhall were all taken from the history of the Low Countries. It was thus that Alma Tadema became acquainted with their early annals by which his own first pictures were inspired.

It was the sale of one of these, _The Education of the Children of Clovis_, bought by the King of the Belgians, that made it possible for the young artist to call his mother and sister to live with him in Antwerp. This removal of his family gave Alma Tadema intense joy, for he is one of those wholesomely constituted beings to whom family life is an absolute necessity. In order for him to be happy and to have his mind free to work at his congenial occupation, it is needful to his nature that outside circumstances be calm, and that his existence be surrounded by an atmosphere of tenderness and affection.

Four years after joining her son, Madame Tadema died. It is sad to think that this good parent did not live to witness her son's world-wide fame, but pleasant to know that she still heard the praise aroused by some of his first exhibited pictures, and to see him the recipient of his first gold medal, that accorded to him at Amsterdam in 1862. In 1865 Tadema married a French lady, and removed to Brussels, where he remained until his wife's death. This occurred in 1869, when he was left alone with his sister and two little girls, the eldest, Laurence, who has developed into a gifted writer, and the second, Anna, the delicate, dainty artist who has inherited so much of her father's power for reproducing detail.

It was during the lifetime of his first wife that Alma Tadema paid his first visit to Italy and saw with his own eyes the homes of those Romans who were destined to become his most familiar friends.

This journey, as might be expected, exerted a strong influence upon his art, but it did not entirely reverse all his views and methods, as has been the case with many other artists. The fact is that Alma Tadema had of set purpose avoided going to Italy before this date. On this point he had, and has always had, a very pronounced opinion. According to him the influence of Italy is so potent, so epoch-making in the life of an artist, that he should never go there until he is himself mature and has already found his own road. Otherwise all he sees in that magic land only helps to unsettle him, and hence hinders rather than helps forward the evolutionary development of the man's own artistic idiosyncrasy.

And indeed Alma Tadema's opinion would seem right on this point, though it is in direct opposition to the practice of all the art schools and academies of the world. It is certainly strange how few of those who gain travelling scholarships, of those who are Prix de Rome and are sent to the Villa Medici, become great and original artists.

Speaking on this theme one day Tadema remarked, "Of what use is it to try and graft a branch laden with fruit upon a sapling. If the sapling has no trunk how is it possible to effect a graft? Rubens followed the right principle, and so after having extracted from foreign travel the best it could give he still remained Rubens. But what would have happened if he had undertaken his journey prematurely, that is to say before the artist inside him was fully developed?"

On another occasion Alma Tadema expressed his views on the same subject: "It is my belief that an art student ought not to travel. When once he has become an artist, conscious of his own aim, of his own wants, he will certainly profit by seeing the works of the great masters, because he will then be able to understand them, and can then, if necessary, appropriate such things as may appear useful to him. With one or two exceptions the Prix de Rome men are not the foremost of their day. Meissonier, Gerome, van Leys, remained at home till they had become consummate artists. Rembrandt never left Amsterdam, and Rubens, when travelling through Italy, made some sketches after Lionardo da Vinci which might pass as original Rubens, because Rubens was already Rubens when he did them. Vandyck and Velasquez travelled when they were already Vandyck and Velasquez, but not before."

The great picture dealer in those early days of Alma Tadema's art life was the Frenchman, M. Gambart, "Prince Gambart," as he used to be called in playful irony, for it was he who controlled and regulated the picture market of Europe, to the immense benefit of his own pocket. It is but fair, however, to add that he was a generous as well as a discerning dealer. When he was visiting any city in his commercial capacity, the whisper "Gambart is here!" would run round all the studios, and many a plot did unknown young artists lay in order to wile him into their workshops, and keen was the disappointment if the great man left the city after visiting only the studios of one or two of the most noted men, ignorant of all the schemes and plans that had been laid to entrap him.

The young Alma Tadema was among those who plotted to secure a visit from the great Gambart, and he too was doomed to see his hopes dashed. At last, however, these hopes were fulfilled. It was thanks to van Leys, who had purposely given a wrong address to Gambart's coachman, directed to carry his master to the studio of a painter then much _en vogue_. Hence it came that the great dealer found himself in front of Alma Tadema's modest studio instead. In the doorway stood the young artist palpitating with excitement. Gambart, who by this time had perceived his error, was too good-natured to turn back without entering. After he had looked at the work upon the easel in silence, he suddenly asked in brusque tones, "Do you mean to tell me you painted this picture?" Alma Tadema bowed his acquiescence, he was too overcome to speak. "Well," replied the dealer, after asking the price and a few other details, "turn me out twenty-four other pictures of this kind and I will pay for them at progressive prices, raising the figure after each half dozen."

This was indeed an unexpected stroke of good fortune for Alma Tadema, who at once set to work to fulfil his commission. It was not all plain sailing however. Gambart wished to pin down the wings of the artist's fantasy, and it was only after long discussion and bargaining that he permitted the painter to choose his themes from among classical subjects instead of remaining among those of the Middle Ages in which he had first found him engaged.

It was thus that some of the most famous of the artist's earlier works were included in this series ordered at so much the half dozen, as if they had been gloves or any article of haberdashery.

It took Alma Tadema four years to carry out Gambart's first commission. When he was at the finish of his task, Gambart once more appeared upon the scene.

"I want you to paint me another twenty-four pictures," was the quaint order given by this dealer--Maecenas again offering to remunerate Alma Tadema at an ascending rate of payment, only this time the starting point was a very much higher figure.

Once more the artist consented. The first work of the new series was the famous _Vintage_. When the dealer saw it he perceived that it was a far more important canvas than any of its predecessors, a work, too, that had cost the artist far more time and labour, and he at once insisted upon paying for it the figure which was to have been given for the last half dozen. For Gambart, despite his profession and his bizarre ways, was liberal and generous, and perhaps he understood too that it paid to be honest.

Alma Tadema is fond of telling the tale how, when he had finished his second two dozen pictures, Gambart invited him and the whole artistic colony of Brussels to dinner. To our artist's no small surprise, he found that it was he who was the guest of honour. In front of his plate there shone a silver goblet bearing a most flattering inscription, while into his table-napkin was folded a large cheque, a sum accorded to him by Gambart beyond the stipulated price.

An accident brought Tadema to London in 1870, and here he at once took root. A year later he remarried, his wife this time being Miss Laura Theresa Epps, a woman of rare beauty, and herself a painter of distinction.

For many years Tadema's home was in Regent's Park Road, a modest London residence which by his ingenuity he transformed into a fairy palace. He afterwards moved into larger quarters in Grove End Road, where he has reared a house entirely upon his own designs that repeats on a larger and more sumptuous scale the beauties of the earlier residence.

In Alma Tadema's case the environment does indeed explain the man. His keen sense of beauty, his classic tastes, his love of flowers, make themselves felt in every nook and corner of his abode; in the silver-walled studio with its onyx windows, in its mosaic atrium, in which a fountain splashes, in Lady Tadema's special room with its oak-beamed ceiling, its Dutch panelling, its old Dutch furniture, in its low-windowed library packed with splendid illustrated works on artistic themes, in its pretty garden ever gay with blossoms, with its fish pond and trellised colonnade. In almost every room can be reconstructed the scenes of his pictures; the lustrous marble basin in the sky-lit atrium bears upon its sloping rim a heap of withered rose leaves, faintly recording that rich shower of fragrance which once suggested a striking detail in the Heliogabalus picture. The burnished brass steps appearing at frequent intervals figure over and over again in the pictures of Roman villas and classical environments. Perhaps one of the most striking features of this house, which is filled with objects of priceless worth, is its unevenness of pavement. There are such endless nooks and alcoves, each room is conceived upon a different scale and may be lower or higher than its immediate neighbour, and yet, most marvellous of all, the cluster of beautiful apartments perfectly harmonize one with another. From the oblong entrance hall, over whose fireplace runs the greeting,

"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends",

whose wall decorations consist in panels painted for the artist by his friends, to the low-lying dining-room, looking upon the garden and shaded by the great tree which it is Tadema's delight to watch in its leaf unfolding, its full summer verdure and its winter gauntness, all is beautiful, all is sympathetic, and all is the result of an ardent appreciation of the artistic possibilities of the most humble objects of domestic life.

Through all the rooms are scattered portraits of its beautiful women inmates, here a statue of Lady Alma Tadema, there a window into whose delicately coloured panes are fashioned the likenesses of the quaint little girls who have now grown to women, outside under the window of these same daughters' room is a beautiful bit of sculptured frieze bearing the interwoven tulips of Holland, lilies of France, and English roses.

The most frequent guest finds continual surprises in this house whose every accessory is as carefully conceived as one of the details of its master's pictures.

Holland, Greece, London and Rome have all contributed their quota to render this house _sui generis_, and once we have passed the postern gate that leads from Grove End Road into the garden we instinctively feel ourselves incorporated into another world, another clime, and London and its squalor, its fogs and cold, are forgotten for a time.

It is in this congenial _milieu_ that the artist works, a _milieu_ helpful and suggestive to the special character of his art. His life since his removal to England has been uneventful. The saying, "Happy those who have no history" might be applied to Tadema. Hard work, persistent study, unremitting efforts after ever greater perfection of style and treatment, sum up Alma Tadema's artistic existence.

He is essentially a sociable man, a lover of his kind. His work is only interrupted by visits from friends, by weekly afternoon and evening receptions, so charming that the entrée is greatly coveted, by the claims upon his time as Professor at the Royal Academy and member of the Council; demands all of which he fulfils with his characteristic strenuousness and high sense of duty. In 1876 he became an Associate Member of the Royal Academy, and in 1879 a Royal Academician. In 1899 he received the well-merited honour of knighthood at the hands of Queen Victoria.

It is not often that Alma Tadema leaves the house to which he is devoted, both for its beauty and because it harbours all whom he holds dear, for he is essentially a domestic man. Occasional visits to the English country, which he greatly admires, and rare trips to Italy, which he naturally loves, are all the holidays he allows himself, and even during such changes of place he does not permit himself rest, but is ever studying fresh effects of light and colour, fresh combinations, imbibing fresh artistic suggestions. Nothing escapes Tadema's wide-open eyes; he is never too weary to receive a new impression.

As a man he has about him no trace of the pedantry which might be anticipated from the archaic character of his work. He is generous, genial, warm-hearted, a lover of jokes and anecdotes good and bad, a cheery optimist, a boon companion in the best sense of that term. He is also the truest and most faithful of friends, and the kindest and most large-hearted of teachers. His appreciation of the works of others is wide and sincere, and, no matter how different this work may be from his own style and taste, he gives to it its due meed of praise, provided it be executed with honest intent.

London society is familiar with this wiry, strong-set figure, with this face of kindly comeliness, with the cheery voice, with the frank, observant eye, the merry quips and pranks, the energy, the intense love of all that is great, and good, and lovely. To be with him is to feel invigorated, for he seems to have so much superfluous vitality that he is able to dispense it to his surroundings.

Of his art he rarely speaks, and still more rarely of his art-theories. Indeed he is no theorist, though he knows perfectly well at what ends he aims, and his art, like his personality, is homogeneous throughout. But it is not in his nature to analyze, he follows his instincts, and these are true and right. "To thine own self be true," has been his life motto, and faithfully has he served it.

THE WORK OF ALMA TADEMA

The first in date of Alma Tadema's preserved paintings is a cycle of pictures dealing with Merovingian times. To these Merovingians he was early attracted, partly perhaps because in his old home and birthplace relics, such as coins, medals, armour belonging to that epoch were the only antiquities the soil could boast. Added to this, chance threw into his way Gregory of Tours' History of the Franks and the quaint old chronicler completely captivated his fancy. From this treasure-house of fact and fiction he drew a series of pictures which, if no more historically correct than Gregory himself, were nevertheless carefully pondered pieces of archæological improvisation in which the minute studies of accessories made while still in Frisia stood Alma Tadema in good stead. _Clotilde at the Grave of her Grandchildren_ was an incident entirely without foundation in fact, but one of Gregory's stories had suggested the situation, and Tadema at once realized its dramatic and pictorial possibilities. In treatment this canvas was still a little hard and dry, the influence of van Leys' somewhat arid manner was too apparent. The same criticism applies, but in a less degree, to its successor, the work that won for Alma Tadema his first success, _The Education of the Children of Clovis_. This, too, was inspired by the old Prankish chronicler, and here also, as often in Alma Tadema's art, a good deal of previous knowledge is requisite in order fully to appreciate the composition. It cannot be denied that this is one of the difficulties of truly understanding the painter's work. His subjects are apt to be at times a little too archæological, a little too literary for immediate or easy explanation. Their atmosphere is inclined to be somewhat remote from common knowledge or interest. Nevertheless in this canvas the tale is sufficiently told, and already the real Alma Tadema is making himself felt in the greater richness of the colouring and in the skilful disposition of the figures. Quite especially free and energetic is the figure of the eldest boy throwing his axe at the mark, and that of his teacher looking on intently to see how his charge conducts himself during this public exposition of his prowess. This work, which is now the property of the King of the Belgians, was bought by the Antwerp Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts for the paltry sum of one thousand six hundred francs, an amount which at the time seemed a large remuneration to its painter.

This picture was followed by yet others, all inspired by the Merovingian chronicles that had taken such a firm hold upon the artist's imagination. In each successive picture the scheme of colour grew fuller and warmer, the dull manner of the master van Leys was more and more abandoned, the real Alma Tadema made himself more and more felt. His own individuality, his own methods of conception became manifest. This is especially the case in a picture called _Gonthram Bose_, another of the Merovingian series. We here see Alma Tadema already applying his peculiar capacity of filling in every inch of the canvas, thus often giving to the tiniest space a sense of vastness, of distance, of immensity, that renders his smallest works such marvellous gems of concentrated beauty. Of course it took time to learn to do this without arousing a sense of overcrowding, a fault that occurs even in one or two of his later works, but more and more as he advanced this danger was eliminated and the capabilities hidden in this artifice became ever more manifest. The little figures with which he peopled his pictures also steadily advanced in correctness of movement and bore about them a local physiognomy that revived an entire historical epoch in a few square inches of canvas. The whole Merovingian period seemed incarnated in these works.

This same capacity of resuscitating a remote historical time was yet more pleasantly revealed when Alma Tadema at last turned from painting these gorgeous but bloodthirsty barbarians, and applied himself instead to the mysterious land of Egypt, the source of all culture and all knowledge, the land he has never seen, but which he has apprehended so wonderfully with the eye of his brain. The German Egyptologist and novelist, George Ebers, a friend of Alma Tadema's, to whom he dedicated one of his historical tales, once asked him what it was that had turned him from his Franks towards the land of Isis. Alma Tadema replied, "Where else should I have begun as soon as I became acquainted with the life of the ancients? The first thing a child learns of ancient history is about the Court of Pharaoh, and if we go back to the source of art and science must we not return to Egypt?"

This migration to the Nile closed what may be termed Alma Tadema's first artistic period, which embraces the ten years that lie between 1852 and 1862. In 1863 he exhibited his _Egyptians Three Thousand Years Ago_. Here, though archæological knowledge was manifest, Tadema did not sacrifice his picture to a pedantic display of learning. On the contrary, it rather seemed his object to show that these dead and gone old Egyptians, whom we are too inclined to think of as the stiff, lifeless figures that greet us from the temples and stone carvings of their native land, were men and women like to ourselves. A work such as this exhibited great study, more perhaps than that demanded by his Merovingians. But from the outset it was evident that Alma Tadema would not covenant with prevailing fashions in art in order to buy public favour at a cheap price. He would take up no task which did not commend itself to his æsthetic faith, to his individual inclination, to the particular preferences of his taste. Never, even at the outset of his career, when financial success had not yet come, did Alma Tadema convert his function of artist into an easy or lucrative profession.

In _The Mummy, The Widow, The Egyptian at his Doorway_, Tadema for the first time applies the methods of genre painting to the treatment of antique themes. This novel manner of dealing with archæology, which is really of his creation, has found a large school of imitators, none of whom, however, approach the master either for spontaneity of conception or skill of execution. This leaning towards genre and its application to subjects that had hitherto not invited treatment in this manner, may probably be traced to Tadema's Dutch origin, seeing that the Dutch were past masters in this form of composition, which by them was chiefly used to illustrate trivial moments of their immediate environment.

The most remarkable of these works is the _Death of the First-born_; indeed, Tadema ranks it as his best picture, and has never yet accepted any offer for its purchase. It hangs permanently in his studio, and is looked upon by his family as a priceless possession. The date of this work is 1873, when the artist had already begun to turn his attention to those Greco-Roman themes with which his fame has since been so closely associated. As the picture is not familiar to the world from reproductions, we will describe it at length.

In this picture of the last, worst plague of Egypt, we find pathos, despair, and that silent grief which "whispers to the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break."

We enter a great Egyptian temple where darkness and gloom, oppressive in their intensity, are only relieved by the gleam of moonlight seen through a distant doorway, and by a single lamp which makes the surrounding shadows more deep. In the foreground is a pillar with hieroglyphics inscribed upon it, its capital lost in the darkness gives a strange sense of awe, but the pervading influence, the power of the scene, is the apprehension of death which seems to rest over the mighty columns, which fills the great temple, which bows to the earth Pharaoh himself, for it is his first-born who lies dead before him. Priests and musicians are gathered round lamps standing on the floor. The priests are chanting their prayers, and the musicians are touching strange-looking instruments. The entire effect is gloomy and awe-inspiring in the extreme. The colouring is sombre with its inimitable use of greens and browns. The surroundings fitly prepare us for the central group of four persons who cluster round the figure of the desolate king. It is one of the extraordinary effects of this picture that the accessories strike the observer first, and in their mournful disposition prepare him for the chief interest, although both spiritually and actually, Pharaoh and his attendants hold the centre of the canvas. The king sits upon a low stool, and across his knees lies the slender body of his first-born. The dead face of the almost nude youth is indescribably sweet, and around his neck hangs limply a strangely-fashioned golden chain, probably bearing some amulet to shield the king's son from harm. The king, upon whose figure the light falls, wears his crown, the brilliant jewels of which seem to mock his helpless grief. He sits rigid, immovable, the strong, proud man will make no sign, but there is one feature which even his powerful will cannot control, his mouth trembles ever so slightly, so faintly that at first it is not distinguishable. But what grief it expresses, this faint indistinctness of outline! This figure might be taken as the embodiment of grief, grief fixed and immutable, and like all true emotion, truly expressed, with not a hint of morbidness. The mother sits near, bowed to the earth in her sorrow. She, too, has striven to be strong, and even in this outburst of despair, shows self-restraint. At the other side of Pharaoh sits the physician whose powers have been useless in this combat. Outside the temple door two figures approach. They are Moses and Aaron coming to behold their work.

This is a truly marvellous picture, and it is not strange that Alma Tadema retains it in his own hands. It is so true, so complex, so alive, that at every view, with every changing light it reveals new features, new aspects of sorrow, and yet with its profundity of sorrow it is not too tragic to live with. It is so true, so human, so beautiful, and so deep, that it does not repel. About Alma Tadema's art there is nothing false or strained; he is always healthy, there is in his nature no strain of morbidness, and hence whatever he paints appeals direct to the truest feelings, whether he paints the glad, sensuous world of the ancients, or the tragedies which befell them, there is never in his work the sickly introspection, the hyper-analysis of modern days. Just as in his _Tarquinius and Emperor_, Alma Tadema proved that he could express tragedy, so here he has shown conclusively that he can express pathos and that he is possessed of a deep imagination, which, unfortunately, he puts forth all too rarely. Had Alma Tadema created but this one superb work he would be among the greatest artists of our time.

This _Death of the First-born_ is a true representation of Egyptian life, and, as if to prove how accurate are the artist's instincts, it is noteworthy that he placed at the feet of the dead a wreath of flowers which strikingly resembles a like garland, found ten years after the picture was painted, in the royal tombs of Deir el Bahari.

Meantime however, as we have said, he had begun to paint genre pictures of Greek and Roman life, and so numerous are these, so rapidly did he produce them, that it is impossible in our limited space to enumerate even the most important. We have chosen a few at random, taking care however to select from among the most noteworthy. One of his finest early Roman pictures is, beyond question, the _Tarquinius Superbus_, in which Tadema has shown what tragic power he could wield when he wished. But his general inclination leads him to let us see his men and women merely as they present their outward faces. He cares not to look beyond, to apprehend the informing intention, the psychic force of his creations.

This idiosyncrasy is based on the artist's character which is singularly direct, and to which introspection and analytic research is distasteful. Of quite a different character is the _Pyrrhic Dance_, a wonderful _tour de force_. We are made to feel that these Dorian fighters, executing a war-dance, are heavily armed, and that it is only their skill and agility which makes their choregraphic evolutions appear light under such heavily handicapped conditions. Indeed, as we know from history, but few could execute with grace and skill this "mimic warrior armour game" as Plato calls it, it might so easily become ridiculous and it is not the least of Tadema's merits in this canvas that he has treated it without the least touch of exaggeration, and with a gravity and dignity that are truly admirable.

_The Vintage_, painted just before Tadema's removal to England, is in some respects one of his most important and most characteristic works. It has been objected that Alma Tadema is essentially a painter of repose. To this picture as well as to the _Pyrrhic Dance_ this criticism cannot be applied. The first thing that strikes us as we look at the work is the sense of motion and music which it imparts. Another of the objections sometimes made to Alma Tadema's work is that his men and women, but more especially his women, are not in accordance with usually recognized classical standards. His favourite types are rather of the heavy build that would be connected more readily with Holland than with Rome, though in some of the portrait busts of empresses preserved in the Vatican, and other sculpture galleries, we see frequent precedents for this preference, a preference that became more and more emphasized after the artist's removal to England. In learning, in technical excellence, in the remarkable finish of all the multitudinous details, the work is admirable. Here, too, he has not permitted the details to distract our attention from the main intention of the picture; we think first and last of the procession and put the accessories, correct and wonderfully painted though they are, into their proper artistic place. Alma Tadema's pictures may at times seem to proclaim too loudly the equality of all visible things, and this equal attention to each object sometimes prevents the concentration of our attention upon the central point of interest. It is this peculiarity which led Ruskin to make his savage and most unfair onslaught upon the painter in his Academy Notes of 1875.

The _Sculpture Gallery_, a newer and more skilful version of a previous picture on the same theme, painted in 1864, furnished the tag upon which Ruskin hung his attack. This later _Sculpture Gallery_ was the companion to the Picture Gallery exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, which was again a sort of extension of an earlier work called the _Roman Amateur_. In the atrium of a Roman house, a fat swarthy Roman, a man of little distinction, no doubt a _nouveau riche_ of his period, exhibits to his visitors a silver statue. There is an impressive pomposity about his manner, as though he were dilating upon the statue's intrinsic metallic worth rather than upon its artistic merits, and his guests seem to be on the level of his own artistic tastes.

In the two versions of the _Sculpture Gallery_ this idea is extended. In the first version the famous Lateran statue of Sophocles was introduced, and indeed forms the central point of interest. Around it are grouped three Romans, one woman and two men, evidently eagerly discussing its artistic merits. All Tadema's fine draughtsmanship, all his unique skill in the painting of lucent surfaces is here to the fore.

The second _Sculpture Gallery_ was yet more elaborate in design and purpose. The work of art exhibited in this instance is placed within a back shop of the epoch, the front towards the streets being reserved for smaller and less important objects. A company of rich amateurs has evidently sauntered in to behold the latest acquisitions of the dealer. A colossal vase, poised upon a revolving pedestal, is especially claiming their attention. A slave slowly turns it round that they may view it in every light. We know him to be a slave by the crescent-shaped token he wears suspended from his neck. The effect of in-door and out-door illumination, and of reflected light from the shimmering surfaces of the objects in the shop is rendered with scientific accuracy and rare technical ability. Full of ingenious and most difficult light effects, too, is the _Picture Gallery_, in which we see a crowd of noble Roman dames and knights admiring the triptychs of the period wherewith the walls are hung and the easels loaded.

This theme, with considerable variants, had been treated once before by Tadema. Indeed, he is fond of repeating his initial idea in different shape. This time the work is called _Antistius Labeon_. It represents an amateur Roman painter, a contemporary of Vespasian, showing off his latest productions to the friends who have dropped into his studio. It seems, so Tadema tells us, that the gentleman painter, who was a Roman pro-consul, was rather looked down upon by his contemporaries for his amateur tastes. It was thought gentlemanly in those days to admire art but not to practise it, an idea that even in early Victorian days we find not quite extinct.

It was on these two fine works, _The Sculpture Gallery_ and _The Picture Gallery_, that Alma Tadema's world-wide reputation was first based. A great continental dealer bought them, and as engravings as well as in the widely exhibited originals they became familiar to all lovers of the beautiful. From this time onward Alma Tadema could not paint fast enough to satisfy the demands made upon his brush; but this success only increased the rigidity of the demands he made upon himself. The more successful Alma Tadema has been, the more conscientious has he become, a rare quality, and one that cannot be too highly praised or too much admired. His passionate love of colour, a passion that seems to have grown upon him as time passed, and as he abandoned more and more his earlier drier manner, found expression after his election as associate to the Royal Academy in a number of small but most perfect little canvases that often dealt with nothing in particular, and to which the artist was at times embarrassed to give names, or whose titles, when found, were not specially distinctive, but which each in their kind was a perfect gem of technique of radiant tints. And after all, why need a picture have a name, _à tout prix_? Whistler was not so wrong when he labelled some of his works as "Symphonies" and "Harmonies" of colour. Such titles would best describe many of Alma Tadema's smaller colour creations.

And now, his own line fully found, Tadema worked on steadily, without haste or pause. In a _milieu_ far distant indeed from the scene of their creation, a London atmosphere, a London sky, he caused to live again for a while in effigy the men and maidens of Magna Graecia, of Rome, of Parthenope, and above all of Sicily, for Tadema's out-door scenes are too southern in feeling and in tone even for the furthest shores of the Peninsula, and belong by rights to the Syren isle. Here alone are found the unclouded sapphire skies, the seas sun-bathed and innocent of angry waves, the luxuriant vegetation, the mad wealth of roses that seem to spring by magic from Tadema's brush, and are the outcome of his fervid imagination that can behold these things with his mental vision while fog and grim winter are raging outside. It is one of Tadema's rare and precious gifts that he can see his picture finished before he has put brush to canvas. It is this gift which makes it unnecessary for him to execute the usual amount of sketching, indeed, Tadema may be said not to sketch at all; it is this that lends to his hand his rare security, and this that helps towards his precision of execution. Everything is clearly, sharply outlined in his art. His canvases show no quiet, slumberous distances, no mysterious twilights of life or nature. All is evident, all is distinct, all sharply defined as in the meridional landscape that he loves, and all this is rendered with that accuracy, with those small touches of extreme sharpness, which recall the precise methods of his Dutch pictorial ancestors. These are merits, but they are merits that also contain hidden within their excellence the germs of what by some may be considered as defects. There is apt to be a lack of repose about a picture of Alma Tadema's, our eye is not necessarily led at once to the central purpose of the work, each action seems of equal importance, and is painted in the same scheme of values.

As an example of Alma Tadema's painstaking, and of how he lets no trouble or expense stand in the way of making his pictures just as perfect as possible, it may be mentioned that during the whole of the winter when he was at work on his _Heliogabalus_ the artist sent twice a week for boxes of fresh roses from the Riviera. Thus each flower may be said to have been painted from a different model.

Only once in his life did Alma Tadema paint a life-size nude figure. This was the work called _A Sculptor's Model_. It was inspired by the Venus of the Esquiline, then but lately unearthed; the painter's intention was to show, as far as possible, the conditions under which such a masterpiece might have been created. It was also painted as a model for his pupil John Collier, one of the very few pupils whom Alma Tadema has ever received into his studio.

It should be mentioned that Alma Tadema at times paints in water colours as well as in oils, a medium he manipulates most successfully, and which lends itself most admirably to his limpid effects of sea and sky. He has also of late years taken to portrait painting. His wonderfully careful technique has here full play, and the perfection of finish fills us with admiration. But, despite their merits, it is hard to think of these portraits as Alma Tadema's; with his name, whether we will or no, we are forced to associate blue skies, placid seas, spring flowers, youths and maidens in the heyday of life, and a sense of old-world happiness and distance from our less beautiful modern existence and surroundings.

THE ART OF ALMA TADEMA

It is fortunately not possible to define with real precision the position Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema occupies in art, since happily he is still living and working among us--and long may he so live to turn out yet other scores of sun-filled joyous canvases, speaking to a weary and hard-driven generation, of vanished and more placid times, when existence was less restless and more æsthetically conceived! Nor, though he has had imitators by the dozen, is it as yet possible to determine the exact nature of the influence he has exerted upon the art of his age, for with rare exceptions these imitators have turned out frigid, lifeless works that bear the same relation to the master's style and manner as oleographs bear to original paintings. Neither is it quite possible to classify Alma Tadema's manner. A number of influences, partly extraneous, or accidental, partly the result of birth and atavism, have resulted in causing his art to be _sui generis_. If he must be classed at all, although a much younger man, he might be grouped with those artists who came to the fore on the continent soon after the upheaving epoch of 1848, men who endeavoured to revive the more intimate life of Greece and Rome upon their canvas, and who in France went by the name of neo-Greeks or Pompeists. This trend was a reaction from the older classical school that was headed by Jacques Louis David, whose productions were distinguished by a certain austere dignity of conception, by elaborate accuracy of form, but, on the other hand, were generally cold and unreal in sentiment, unpleasantly monotonous in colouring, and defective in their arrangement of light and shade.

It has been most felicitously remarked, that if David may be named the Corneille of the Roman Empire, Alma Tadema may be said to be its Sardou. He has made his ancients more living, he has resuscitated them with less visible effort; he seems to have an instinctive comprehension of antiquity. His is not the Rome of Ingres, of Poussin, of grand public ceremonies, of battles, of the Forum and the rostrum, of actions that upheaved the world; he gives us instead the home life of this people, Rome such as we divine it to have been from Cicero's letters to Atticus, the life of the ancients as presented to us in the plays of Terence and Plautus. It is not mere historical painting that he aims at, indeed his art bears the same relation to history as does the anecdote to serious narrative, a lighter species which nevertheless often throws a brighter light upon the past than scores of learned tomes. And this result is largely achieved by his love of detail, which causes him to crowd his canvas with masses of those authentic bibelots which ancient and recent excavations and the aid of photography have brought within the reach of all.

The elder classical painters thought to render their work more truly classical by placing their protagonists in large empty monumental spaces, just as Corneille and Racine thought to give the true classical ring to their plays when they removed them from every-day emotions, and rolled out high-sounding and rhetorical phrases. Alma Tadema, instead, is convinced that these dead-and-gone folk were in all fundamental essentials like to ourselves, that they lived, loved, joked and chattered just as we do, and this conviction has found expression in his pictures that deal less and less with the graver, grander moments of their existence, and more with the petty intimate details of their home life. His pictures might almost be said to be a series of instantaneous reproductions of the life of the Roman patricians. The plebs have no interest for him, they rarely figure in his canvases, and when they do their figures are entirely subordinate. The Roman of Alma Tadema's pictures abides in a world of idle luxury, in which nothing matters much unless it ministers to sensuous enjoyment. It is the outward seeming of life and objects that attracts him, their inner deeper meaning matters to him as little as their subject. The life aim of his men and women seems to be to exist happily and placidly, untroubled by material cares or disturbing emotions.

In his method of composing his pictures Alma Tadema's manner is also the absolute antithesis of what is commonly regarded as the classic method. So far is he from putting his principal personages well into the middle of his canvas, from following a pyramidal arrangement, that in his effort to be natural and unconventional, he even at times commits extravagances in order to escape from the beaten path, as, for example, in his portrait of Dr. Epps, in which there are shown one head and a bust, no arms, but three hands, the third being that of the unseen patient whose pulse the physician is supposed to feel. This is an extreme instance, but a tendency to dismember his figures, to show us only half a figure, a detached head, a hand without a body, a foot without a visible leg, occurs every now and again, and not certainly to the detriment of a realistic effect, but most certainly to the detriment of composition as classically understood. This tendency, no doubt, results from his love of Japanese art, an art that has had a visible influence upon his methods of disposing his composition. Indeed, it might almost be said that Alma Tadema does not compose his pictures at all. He certainly does not do so according to the ordinary acceptance of the term in art, he rather disposes his personages about his canvas, apparently at hazard, much as they might group themselves in real life. But under this seeming negligence, is hidden great care, immense painstaking, a striving to give to his pictures their maximum of expressive force, for in Alma Tadema's work, everything as well as every person, has its suggestive purpose. As M. de la Sizeranne has well said, few painters have less of that element which in the jargon of the studio is known as _poids mort_. But this very merit causes his pictures to lack concentration. There is no point on which our eye fixes at once as the central, most important, and the meaning of the whole may often be hidden in some accessory that the ordinary observer is apt to overlook. Thus, for example, in one of his Claudius series is seen, poised on a cippus, a head of Augustus, dominating as it were the whole bloody, rowdy, undignified scene. How many who see the work have remarked that the bust is turned toward a picture that represents a naval engagement, and that underneath this picture is written the single word "Actium," suggestive of a vast antithesis. Subtle little touches such as these often render Alma Tadema's more important works a puzzle to those unversed in classic lore, and oblige us to class him, if classed he must be, among the erudite artists whose roots are planted in the soil of literature. Yet, surely, if there exists a domain where erudition should take a secondary place it is that of art, which shares with poetry the high privilege of soaring so high as to have the right to disdain the mere minutiae of history, the petty details of life.