Highly successful 19th-century artistic giant who was largely ignored in subsequent decades.
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was born on January 8, 1836. Alma-Tadema studied art in Antwerp; a honeymoon in Italy, Greece, and Pompeii kindled his interest in Classical artistic ideals. He spent a significant amount of time studying archaeological sites or photographs of them. Visits to the sites gave him subject matter as he increased his study and knowledge of daily life in the Greek and Roman empires.
Alma-Tadema moved to England in 1869 and began creating paintings of partially-clothed women posed before backdrops from ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. At times he integrated so many objects into his paintings that some said they resembled museum catalogs. Alma-Tadema's works are remarkable for the way in which flowers, textures, and hard reflecting surfaces like metals, pottery, and especially marble are recreated – in fact his realistic depiction of marble led him to be called the “marbelous painter.” His work shows much of the detailed draftsmanship, brilliant colors, and technical skill of the Dutch masters. He became one of the most famous and highly paid artists of his time.
But because of the rise of post-impressionism, cubism, and modern art, Alma-Tadema’s work fell out of favor and became next to impossible to sell. Critic John Ruskin called him "the worst painter of the 19th century." Like Bouguereau, although an artistic giant in his lifetime, he has not been mentioned in art history classes since the 1950s. I never heard of him in any art history class I attended.
Thankfully today he is regarded as a principal classical-subject and academic painter whose works demonstrate the skill of an era concerned with recreating the past, some of which was being discovered through archaeological research, and continuing the traditions of the old masters. It's shameful that he fell into obscurity for so long.
