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Lot Essay
'Ask me no more: thy fate and mine are seal'd:
I strove against the stream and all in vain:
Let the great river take me to the main:
No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield.'
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess.
This picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1906, when the artist was at the zenith of his career. Born at Dronrijp, Friesland, the son of a notary, he studied at the Antwerp Academy in the 1850s. During this formative period he also met two antiquarians, Georg Ebers and Louis de Taye, who encouraged his interest in the archaeologically authentic rendering of historical themes. This direction was confirmed when he joined the studio of the historical painter Hendrik Leys in 1859.
During his early years Alma-Tadema was attracted to Merovingian and Egyptian subjects, but by the later 1860s he was exploring the Graeco-Roman world that would remain his favourite pictorial territory for the remainder of his career. In 1863 he married and spent his honeymoon in Italy, an experience that profoundly influenced his development by exposing him to the art and architecture of classical antiquity.
In 1864 Alma-Tadema made his debut at the Paris Salon and met the powerful art dealer Ernest Gambart, who gave him commissions and began to show his work in London. In 1870, following the death of his wife and the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the artist himself moved to London, remarrying in 1871 and taking British nationality two years later.
From then on Alma-Tadema was a popular fixture in the London art establishment. His role was to represent the anecdotal end of the spectrum of Victorian classicism, standing at the opposite pole to Albert Moore, who used the idiom to express almost purely formal and abstract values, with the other two leading exponents, Frederic Leighton and E. J. Poynter, holding the middle ground. Although he had his critics, notably John Ruskin, many responded positively to his winning combination of brilliant technique, archaeological erudition, and subjects which flattered their audience by implying that the Victorians were modern Romans. They, like you, his pictures seemed to say, were empire builders, proconsuls and merchant princes, although like you again they were not immune to little domestic crises and bittersweet emotional yearnings.
Alma-Tadema began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1869, the year before he settled in London, and he continued to show there on an annual basis. He was elected an Associate in 1876 and a full Academician three years later. He also supported the Grosvenor Gallery, opened in 1877 as a more liberal, avant-garde rival to the Academy, and the New Gallery, which inherited the mantle of the Grosvenor in 1888. A number of Academicians bridged this divide, especially those, like Alma-Tadema and Leighton, whose work reflected the cult of beauty known as the Aesthetic Movement. In fact, it was the Grosvenor Gallery that gave Alma-Tadema a large retrospective exhibition in 1882.
With his roots deep in European culture, it is not surprising that Alma-Tadema's reputation also stood high abroad, bringing him numerous international honors. In 1899 he was knighted, and in 1905 he was awarded the recently instituted and immensely prestigious Order of Merit. At the R.A. that year he exhibited The Finding of Moses, inspired by a visit to Egypt in 1902 to attend the opening of the Aswan Dam. This sensational picture was sold by Christie's in New York in May 1995, and re-sold in November 2010 for what is still the artist's record price (fig. 1).
'Ask me no more', which takes its title from a poem by the Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is a quintessential Alma-Tadema subject. In fact he treated it so often that it is probably the one with which he is most closely associated: a pair of lovers seated on a marble bench overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The sun always shines in these pictures, although it never seems oppressively hot; and the lovers are invariably shown in a state of emotional anticipation rather than succumbing to passion itself. As Vern Swanson, the leading authority on Alma-Tadema, states in his catalogue raisonné of the artist's paintings, love-making is shown not 'at the point of climax, but rather earlier, when the tension is mounting. The question 'Will she or won't she' is paramount' (V. G. Swanson, 1990, op. cit, p. 268). In the present painting, this mounting tension is centered on the woman's hand. The only point of contact between the two lovers, her hand was the subject of careful attention by Alma-Tadema as the artist's preparatory drawing reveals (fig. 2).
Like all Alma-Tadema's pictures, 'Ask me no more' has an opus number, just like a piece of music. He must have been well aware of the parallel since music played an enormous part in his life. Famous singers and instrumentalists often performed at his Tuesday evening receptions, and he painted a number of portraits of musicians, either in gratitude for their services or on commission. Richter, Joachim, Henschel, Paderewski and others were among his sitters. He also made several ventures into piano design. No fewer than three pianos were executed for his own house, either to his designs or under his supervision. But his most ambitious experiment dated from 1884, when he designed a spectacular grand piano as part of a suite of furniture commissioned by the American financier Henry G. Marquand for his New York mansion. Incorporating a painting by Alma-Tadema's fellow classicist E. J. Poynter, this astonishing piece was sold by Christie's in London on 7 November 1997, lot 86.
Another trademark feature of the painting is the marble bench. Alma-Tadema had made a specialty of painting marble since the late 1850s, and it had become one of his most celebrated accomplishments, endlessly commented on in reviews and even joked about in Punch. Dutch artists had always excelled at still-life, and Alma-Tadema's marble-painting is in this tradition. The same skill emerges in the way he handles flowers, as 'Ask me no more' also demonstrates. But the exquisitely rendered bunch of anemones does more than testify to the painter's virtuoso technique. Evidently a tribute from the youth to his sweetheart, it adds a touch of poignancy to the narrative. It is also a vital compositional element, placing an accent precisely where it is needed, and it provides a focal point for the colour scheme, a subtle interplay of blues, mauves and creams balanced against the pale aquamarine of the girl's dress.
This chromatic harmony is enhanced by the pearly light that pervades the scene, coming from behind the figures to create a contre-jour effect and cast delicate shadows onto the marble pavement. In 1884 Alma-Tadema had taken over 17 Grove End Road, St John's Wood, a house previously occupied by the French artist James Tissot who had fled back to Paris on the death of his muse and mistress, Kathleen Newton. He proceeded to remodel it extensively, furnishing it in a variety of exotic styles and generally turning it into one of the sights of London. Among its many notable features was the apsidal end of the artist's studio, which he had lined with aluminum to create the diffused and silvery light so typical of his later works. 'Ask me no more' is a classic example.
The picture is almost the last in which Alma-Tadema painted his ever-popular theme of a young couple suffering the palpitations of romance, although a watercolour version, entitled Youth, followed in 1908. 'Ask me no more' was the only picture he showed at the R.A. in 1906. He had seldom contributed more than three examples, and one became more or less the norm during his final years.
The picture was hung in Gallery III, the Academy's largest space, and was one of three given what Academy Notes described as 'positions of honour.' The other two were Columbus in the New World by Edwin Austin Abbey, an American painter who had settled in England in the 1880s and achieved phenomenal success with his historical subjects, often conceived as murals; and a portrait of the Duchess of Northumberland by E. J. Poynter, who was now the Academy's President, the two previous incumbents, Leighton and Sir John Everett Millais, having died in quick succession in 1896. Also in the room were further literary and historical subjects by J. W. Waterhouse, Seymour Lucas and Ernest Crofts; landscapes and genre scenes by B. W. Leader, Alfred East, H. H. La Thangue and Stanhope Forbes; and portraits by Orchardson, Dicksee, Fildes, Briton Riviere, Abbey's friend and fellow American John Singer Sargent, and others.
The prevalence of landscapes and portraits here is significant. The heyday of the Victorian subject-picture was over, and many artists were diversifying or turning exclusively to these more accessible genres. Alma-Tadema's reputation was such that he could still command good reviews. Rudolf Dirks, a critic who was to write a study of his late works, including 'Ask me no more', for the Art Journal in 1910, observed in the magazine's regular review of the R.A.'s summer exhibition that the picture 'manifested' Alma-Tadema's 'knowledge of classical costume and architecture in as charming a fashion as ever,' while the Times thought it 'perfect in execution.'
However, other newspapers and journals, far from affording the picture inches of text as they would have done in the past, either failed to mention it or, like the Athenaeum, whose art-critic was no longer the sympathetic F. G. Stephens, who had given Alma-Tadema favourable reviews for years, were actively hostile. It was a graphic example of how fashion was changing. To put the picture's reception in perspective we should remember that by now Impressionism had been known in England for some thirty years, while the far more radical aesthetic of Post-Impressionism was about to confront audiences in London and America. In London, Roger Fry's two ground-breaking Post-Impressionist exhibitions were held at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912. In America, the equally seismic International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the disused armory in Manhattan in February 1913, later moving on to Chicago and Boston.
All this was only four to seven years after Alma-Tadema's picture was shown at the R.A. It is true that the majority of people were outraged by what they saw at these exhibitions, preferring the more familiar and less challenging older idioms; but the fact that the exhibitions were held at all speaks volumes about the way the sands of taste and perception were shifting.
None of this prevented the successful sale of Alma-Tadema's picture. It was commissioned by the London dealer Arthur Tooth, who published a photogravure the same year before selling it on to another dealer, Knoedler. By 1907 it belonged to the Philadelphia collector Felix Isman, and it seems to have remained in America until 1978, returning to London only briefly when it was included in the artist's memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1913.
Alma-Tadema had long been popular in America. The Marquand furniture has already been mentioned, but it was only one example among many. Thanks to Gambart's aggressive marketing, some thirty per cent of his work had crossed the Atlantic, with tycoons like Marquand, the Carnegies and Vanderbilts paying huge sums for his paintings. Moreover, America's love-affair with Alma-Tadema persisted. His influence on Hollywood, especially in his more epic mode, has often been acknowledged, and no one did more to revive his reputation in the 1960s than the American television personality Allen Funt. Funt, who created and hosted the popular and long-running show Candid Camera, formed a large collection of Alma-Tadema's works at this period; and although it was sold prematurely in 1973, it was assembled with such conviction and enthusiasm that the names of him and his hero will always be associated.
Funt's achievement underlines once again the link with showbusiness that is such a constant feature of Alma-Tadema's career and legacy. But it might not have caught the public imagination if shortly before it was dispersed the collection had not been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, under the title Victorians in Togas. This inspired phrase acquired instant immortality, summing up to perfection the imagery, spirit and ethos of Alma-Tadema's work.
(fig. 1) Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Finding of Moses, sold, Sotheby's, New York, 4 November 2010, $35,922,500.
I strove against the stream and all in vain:
Let the great river take me to the main:
No more, dear love, for at a touch I yield.'
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Princess.
This picture was exhibited at the Royal Academy, London, in 1906, when the artist was at the zenith of his career. Born at Dronrijp, Friesland, the son of a notary, he studied at the Antwerp Academy in the 1850s. During this formative period he also met two antiquarians, Georg Ebers and Louis de Taye, who encouraged his interest in the archaeologically authentic rendering of historical themes. This direction was confirmed when he joined the studio of the historical painter Hendrik Leys in 1859.
During his early years Alma-Tadema was attracted to Merovingian and Egyptian subjects, but by the later 1860s he was exploring the Graeco-Roman world that would remain his favourite pictorial territory for the remainder of his career. In 1863 he married and spent his honeymoon in Italy, an experience that profoundly influenced his development by exposing him to the art and architecture of classical antiquity.
In 1864 Alma-Tadema made his debut at the Paris Salon and met the powerful art dealer Ernest Gambart, who gave him commissions and began to show his work in London. In 1870, following the death of his wife and the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, the artist himself moved to London, remarrying in 1871 and taking British nationality two years later.
From then on Alma-Tadema was a popular fixture in the London art establishment. His role was to represent the anecdotal end of the spectrum of Victorian classicism, standing at the opposite pole to Albert Moore, who used the idiom to express almost purely formal and abstract values, with the other two leading exponents, Frederic Leighton and E. J. Poynter, holding the middle ground. Although he had his critics, notably John Ruskin, many responded positively to his winning combination of brilliant technique, archaeological erudition, and subjects which flattered their audience by implying that the Victorians were modern Romans. They, like you, his pictures seemed to say, were empire builders, proconsuls and merchant princes, although like you again they were not immune to little domestic crises and bittersweet emotional yearnings.
Alma-Tadema began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1869, the year before he settled in London, and he continued to show there on an annual basis. He was elected an Associate in 1876 and a full Academician three years later. He also supported the Grosvenor Gallery, opened in 1877 as a more liberal, avant-garde rival to the Academy, and the New Gallery, which inherited the mantle of the Grosvenor in 1888. A number of Academicians bridged this divide, especially those, like Alma-Tadema and Leighton, whose work reflected the cult of beauty known as the Aesthetic Movement. In fact, it was the Grosvenor Gallery that gave Alma-Tadema a large retrospective exhibition in 1882.
With his roots deep in European culture, it is not surprising that Alma-Tadema's reputation also stood high abroad, bringing him numerous international honors. In 1899 he was knighted, and in 1905 he was awarded the recently instituted and immensely prestigious Order of Merit. At the R.A. that year he exhibited The Finding of Moses, inspired by a visit to Egypt in 1902 to attend the opening of the Aswan Dam. This sensational picture was sold by Christie's in New York in May 1995, and re-sold in November 2010 for what is still the artist's record price (fig. 1).
'Ask me no more', which takes its title from a poem by the Poet Laureate, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is a quintessential Alma-Tadema subject. In fact he treated it so often that it is probably the one with which he is most closely associated: a pair of lovers seated on a marble bench overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. The sun always shines in these pictures, although it never seems oppressively hot; and the lovers are invariably shown in a state of emotional anticipation rather than succumbing to passion itself. As Vern Swanson, the leading authority on Alma-Tadema, states in his catalogue raisonné of the artist's paintings, love-making is shown not 'at the point of climax, but rather earlier, when the tension is mounting. The question 'Will she or won't she' is paramount' (V. G. Swanson, 1990, op. cit, p. 268). In the present painting, this mounting tension is centered on the woman's hand. The only point of contact between the two lovers, her hand was the subject of careful attention by Alma-Tadema as the artist's preparatory drawing reveals (fig. 2).
Like all Alma-Tadema's pictures, 'Ask me no more' has an opus number, just like a piece of music. He must have been well aware of the parallel since music played an enormous part in his life. Famous singers and instrumentalists often performed at his Tuesday evening receptions, and he painted a number of portraits of musicians, either in gratitude for their services or on commission. Richter, Joachim, Henschel, Paderewski and others were among his sitters. He also made several ventures into piano design. No fewer than three pianos were executed for his own house, either to his designs or under his supervision. But his most ambitious experiment dated from 1884, when he designed a spectacular grand piano as part of a suite of furniture commissioned by the American financier Henry G. Marquand for his New York mansion. Incorporating a painting by Alma-Tadema's fellow classicist E. J. Poynter, this astonishing piece was sold by Christie's in London on 7 November 1997, lot 86.
Another trademark feature of the painting is the marble bench. Alma-Tadema had made a specialty of painting marble since the late 1850s, and it had become one of his most celebrated accomplishments, endlessly commented on in reviews and even joked about in Punch. Dutch artists had always excelled at still-life, and Alma-Tadema's marble-painting is in this tradition. The same skill emerges in the way he handles flowers, as 'Ask me no more' also demonstrates. But the exquisitely rendered bunch of anemones does more than testify to the painter's virtuoso technique. Evidently a tribute from the youth to his sweetheart, it adds a touch of poignancy to the narrative. It is also a vital compositional element, placing an accent precisely where it is needed, and it provides a focal point for the colour scheme, a subtle interplay of blues, mauves and creams balanced against the pale aquamarine of the girl's dress.
This chromatic harmony is enhanced by the pearly light that pervades the scene, coming from behind the figures to create a contre-jour effect and cast delicate shadows onto the marble pavement. In 1884 Alma-Tadema had taken over 17 Grove End Road, St John's Wood, a house previously occupied by the French artist James Tissot who had fled back to Paris on the death of his muse and mistress, Kathleen Newton. He proceeded to remodel it extensively, furnishing it in a variety of exotic styles and generally turning it into one of the sights of London. Among its many notable features was the apsidal end of the artist's studio, which he had lined with aluminum to create the diffused and silvery light so typical of his later works. 'Ask me no more' is a classic example.
The picture is almost the last in which Alma-Tadema painted his ever-popular theme of a young couple suffering the palpitations of romance, although a watercolour version, entitled Youth, followed in 1908. 'Ask me no more' was the only picture he showed at the R.A. in 1906. He had seldom contributed more than three examples, and one became more or less the norm during his final years.
The picture was hung in Gallery III, the Academy's largest space, and was one of three given what Academy Notes described as 'positions of honour.' The other two were Columbus in the New World by Edwin Austin Abbey, an American painter who had settled in England in the 1880s and achieved phenomenal success with his historical subjects, often conceived as murals; and a portrait of the Duchess of Northumberland by E. J. Poynter, who was now the Academy's President, the two previous incumbents, Leighton and Sir John Everett Millais, having died in quick succession in 1896. Also in the room were further literary and historical subjects by J. W. Waterhouse, Seymour Lucas and Ernest Crofts; landscapes and genre scenes by B. W. Leader, Alfred East, H. H. La Thangue and Stanhope Forbes; and portraits by Orchardson, Dicksee, Fildes, Briton Riviere, Abbey's friend and fellow American John Singer Sargent, and others.
The prevalence of landscapes and portraits here is significant. The heyday of the Victorian subject-picture was over, and many artists were diversifying or turning exclusively to these more accessible genres. Alma-Tadema's reputation was such that he could still command good reviews. Rudolf Dirks, a critic who was to write a study of his late works, including 'Ask me no more', for the Art Journal in 1910, observed in the magazine's regular review of the R.A.'s summer exhibition that the picture 'manifested' Alma-Tadema's 'knowledge of classical costume and architecture in as charming a fashion as ever,' while the Times thought it 'perfect in execution.'
However, other newspapers and journals, far from affording the picture inches of text as they would have done in the past, either failed to mention it or, like the Athenaeum, whose art-critic was no longer the sympathetic F. G. Stephens, who had given Alma-Tadema favourable reviews for years, were actively hostile. It was a graphic example of how fashion was changing. To put the picture's reception in perspective we should remember that by now Impressionism had been known in England for some thirty years, while the far more radical aesthetic of Post-Impressionism was about to confront audiences in London and America. In London, Roger Fry's two ground-breaking Post-Impressionist exhibitions were held at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1912. In America, the equally seismic International Exhibition of Modern Art opened at the disused armory in Manhattan in February 1913, later moving on to Chicago and Boston.
All this was only four to seven years after Alma-Tadema's picture was shown at the R.A. It is true that the majority of people were outraged by what they saw at these exhibitions, preferring the more familiar and less challenging older idioms; but the fact that the exhibitions were held at all speaks volumes about the way the sands of taste and perception were shifting.
None of this prevented the successful sale of Alma-Tadema's picture. It was commissioned by the London dealer Arthur Tooth, who published a photogravure the same year before selling it on to another dealer, Knoedler. By 1907 it belonged to the Philadelphia collector Felix Isman, and it seems to have remained in America until 1978, returning to London only briefly when it was included in the artist's memorial exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1913.
Alma-Tadema had long been popular in America. The Marquand furniture has already been mentioned, but it was only one example among many. Thanks to Gambart's aggressive marketing, some thirty per cent of his work had crossed the Atlantic, with tycoons like Marquand, the Carnegies and Vanderbilts paying huge sums for his paintings. Moreover, America's love-affair with Alma-Tadema persisted. His influence on Hollywood, especially in his more epic mode, has often been acknowledged, and no one did more to revive his reputation in the 1960s than the American television personality Allen Funt. Funt, who created and hosted the popular and long-running show Candid Camera, formed a large collection of Alma-Tadema's works at this period; and although it was sold prematurely in 1973, it was assembled with such conviction and enthusiasm that the names of him and his hero will always be associated.
Funt's achievement underlines once again the link with showbusiness that is such a constant feature of Alma-Tadema's career and legacy. But it might not have caught the public imagination if shortly before it was dispersed the collection had not been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, under the title Victorians in Togas. This inspired phrase acquired instant immortality, summing up to perfection the imagery, spirit and ethos of Alma-Tadema's work.
(fig. 1) Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Finding of Moses, sold, Sotheby's, New York, 4 November 2010, $35,922,500.