Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

1836 - 1912 • Dutch/English • Painter • Academic

"Who knows him well he best can tell that a stouter friend hath no man, than this lusty knight who for our delight hath painted Greek and Roman. " - Comyns Carr, 1899

Alma –Tadema settled in London in 1870. Like his friend and contemporary LEIGHTON, Alma-Tadema created a hedonistic fantasy world of languorous, sensual women in luxuriant settings. These settings were likely to include fur rugs and marble fountains, benches, and columns, the latter archaeologically correct ANTIQUITIEs-Alma –Tadema went to POMPEII to inspect the newly excavated ruins in 1863. If his paintings insulated their viewers from the problems of contemporary life, they also provided strong undercurrents of eroticism. Under the Roof of Blue Ionian Weather (1901) is an oblong canvas filled by a semicircular marble wall tiered with benches. Decorating the benches, besides the suggestion of bas reliefs (see RELIEF), are beautiful women wearing filmy pastel dresses. The title may have been taken from a phrase in a letter Shelley wrote in 1820: "We watched the ocean and sky together, under the roof of blue Italian weather." Alma -Tadema was well rewarded for his work, and in 1899 was knighted. At the banquet celebrating the event, the art critic Comyns Carr wrote the doggerel quoted above, the chorus of a longer composition that was set to music. While Alma  Tadema , Leighton, and, in America , Thomas DEWI NG were creating their decorative, somnolent upper-class women, CEZANNE painted lumpy, nude female bathers; GAUGUIN first painted Breton peasants in native costume, then Polynesian women in Tahiti; and TOULOUSE-LAUTREC documented women as performers in everything from the circus to the whorehouse.