How Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s visions of ‘Victorians in togas’ made him a hit in London — and a player in Hollywood

Before dawn on 2 October 1874, a barge laden with gunpowder exploded on Regent’s Canal behind Townshend House, the home of the artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema. It’s said that the blast was heard right across London. The barge itself was blown to pieces, and its four crew killed.

Alma-Tadema and his family were more fortunate — especially his two daughters, who were asleep in their bedroom at the back of Townshend House when the accident happened. They suffered no more than the shock of being woken by their window being blown in.

The property itself was left in a sorry state, with furniture and homewares dashed to pieces. As repair work began, the family chose to spend the winter in Rome. This was no arbitrary choice. It was the city that dominated the artist’s career: he is best known for his meticulously detailed scenes reimagining life in ancient Rome, which proved a hit on both sides of the Atlantic.

The honours and awards that came Alma-Tadema’s way were myriad. They included being knighted by three different royal houses — of the Netherlands, Belgium and the United Kingdom.

After Alma-Tadema’s death in 1912, the president of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, Sir Edward Poynter, praised the artist for having ‘recreated the beauty of a past age… as though he had lived in it’. Poynter added that Alma-Tadema’s work, ‘in its combination of the highest perfection of workmanship with imaginative qualities that were peculiarly his own, has perhaps never been surpassed’.

As will be explored below, Alma-Tadema’s art fell out of fashion in the years after his death — only to return to it later in the 20th century, in particular among film-makers who set their movies in the classical world, such as Cecil B. DeMille and Ridley Scott.

The National Gallery in London recently acquired the artist’s oil painting After the Audience (1879). It depicts the Roman statesman Marcus Agrippa, a loyal deputy of the emperor Augustus, ascending the stairs of his villa after meeting petitioners from across the empire. This was the third picture secured by the National Gallery to mark its 200th anniversary in 2024 — being acquired from a private collection in negotiations brokered by Christie’s Private Sales.

Lourens Alma Tadema was born in 1836 in the small village of Dronrijp in the northern Netherlands. He would anglicise his first name (to Lawrence) upon moving to London permanently in his mid-thirties. He would also add a hyphen between his middle and last names, some say in a bid to appear near the top of art catalogue indexes.

His father, a notary, died when Lourens was four, and the family struggled to make ends meet. It was hoped that the boy would become a lawyer. However, from a young age he was determined upon a career in art. ‘If I have obtained any degree of success,’ Alma-Tadema said in later life, ‘it is because I have always been faithful to my own ideas.’

Studies at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp gave him a sound academic education. He then joined the studio of Louis De Taeye, a history painter who doubled as a professor of archaeology. De Taeye specialised in scenes of the Frankish past and helped foster in his apprentice an appreciation for things ancient and the importance of historical accuracy.

Alma-Tadema’s early works typically took Merovingian Gaul (from the 5th to the 8th century A.D.) as their setting — Queen Fredegonda at the Deathbed of Bishop Praetextatus (1864), for example, a tense scene in which the clergyman accuses the monarch of hiring an assassin to administer the knife wounds from which he is slowly dying.

This painting, like others from the time, reveals Alma-Tadema’s easy command of perspective — witness the expert foreshortening of the floor pavement.

His education continued in the studio of another Antwerp painter, Henri Leys, from whom he learned to make objects seem as realistic and tangible as possible. When Alma-Tadema painted a table that his master thought looked insufficiently robust, he was told to repaint it and given advice that would remain with him for the rest of his life: ‘I want a table that everybody knocks his knees to pieces on.’

Travel across Europe grew quicker and easier in the second half of the 19th century. A sequence of international exhibitions, starting with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London and the Exposition Universelle of 1855 in Paris, also encouraged artists to exhibit increasingly beyond their own homelands. Alma-Tadema was more alive to this trend than most, and a painting called Pastime in Ancient Egypt Three Thousand Years Ago won him a medal at 1864’s Paris Salon.

He began a profitable working relationship with the London-based dealer Ernest Gambart, and in 1870 the latter tempted Alma-Tadema — shortly after the death of his first wife, Pauline — to move to the British capital.

It had been on his honeymoon with Pauline a few years earlier that the watershed moment of the artist’s career had taken place: visiting Italy for the first time, in particular Rome and Pompeii. Thereafter, scenes set in the classical world became his mainstay. At first, these tended to be domestic, concentrating on episodes in and around ancient homes; but from the mid-1870s onwards, he also produced more expansive scenes, set in urban environments and peopled by large numbers of metropolitan figures.

A fine example of the latter type of picture is Spring (1894), which he painted for the Berlin collector Robert von Mendelssohn. It depicts a festival in the streets of ancient Rome, where barefoot women and children are adorned with floral crowns: some of them carry baskets of flowers, others play musical instruments. One can instantly see why such a work — and others like it — would have appealed to sun-starved collectors in the north of Europe, with its blue sky, bright light, dazzling marble and vibrant colours. In many of the artist’s paintings, the Mediterranean Sea provides an ultra-azure backdrop, adding to the sense of escapism.

Like his peer Frederic, Lord Leighton, Alma-Tadema bridged the movements of Neoclassicism and Aestheticism. However, where Leighton’s take on the classical world was rooted in mythology, Alma-Tadema preferred scenes that were broadly historical.

Indeed, another reason for the success of the latter’s art in late-19th-century Britain was surely a parallel that viewers drew between their own country’s vast empire and the majesty of imperial Rome. Not for nothing was an exhibition of Alma-Tadema’s work in 1973 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York titled Victorians in Togas.

As part of his quest for historical accuracy, the artist kept up to date with the latest archaeological finds and research. The sculpture of Augustus in the foreground of After the Audience, for instance, was based on a statue known as the Augustus of Prima Porta, which had been rediscovered in 1863. Alma-Tadema also read books on the subject and kept an extensive library of photographs of classical sites. There were occasional trips to Italy, too, and frequent visits to the British Museum to consult the ancient artefacts on view.

His sister-in-law, Ellen Epps Gosse, described Alma-Tadema as an artist of ‘utmost diligence’, who ‘will never allow himself to be beaten by the difficulty of any subject’.

That said, Alma-Tadema wasn’t above taking a little artistic licence in the name of a good picture. Though he was painstaking in his depiction of individual motifs, objects and structures, he often combined them in a creative way.

For example, in the upper left of Spring, an inscription from the Arch of Trajan (built in the southern Italian city of Beneventum in the 110s A.D.) appears directly above the relief of a river-god figure from the Arch of Constantine (built in Rome 200 years later).

Alma-Tadema became a prominent figure in Victorian London, renowned for the soirées he and his second wife — the artist Laura Epps — hosted at 17 Grove End Road, St John’s Wood (their home after Townshend House). These included musical receptions on Tuesday nights, where the likes of Anton Rubinstein and Camille Saint-Saëns performed.

He was also a friend of the Prince and Princess of Wales (the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra). A frequent guest at the couple’s house at Sandringham, he painted the canvas God Speed in 1893 (now in the Royal Collection) as a wedding present for their son George (the future George V): it depicts a young woman leaning over the parapet of a tall building to toss roses towards an unseen departee. Alma-Tadema also assisted with the decorations for Edward’s coronation in 1902.

With Gambart’s help, he made his name in the US, where his art was coveted by collectors of the stature of William Henry Vanderbilt, Henry Clay Frick and Henry Gurdon Marquand. They all took up the artist’s declaratory invitation: ‘if you want to know what [the] Greeks and Romans looked like… come to me’.

Alma-Tadema died in 1912, aged 76, and was given the honour of a burial in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. With the rise of modernism, however, as the 20th century unfolded, his luscious scenes of Roman life began to be seen as old-fashioned by much of the art world.

What happened next, however, was remarkable. He grew popular in a medium wholly other than his own: film. That popularity is a subject beyond our scope here, but it’s no exaggeration to say that the classical world recreated in movies such as Quo Vadis (1913), Ben-Hur (1959) and Gladiator (2000) owes as great a debt to Alma-Tadema as it does to perhaps any other figure.

His richly detailed visions of life in antiquity proved a gift to film-makers, not least the masterful flow he created between foreground and background, leading the viewer’s eye from one space into the next — just as a camera operator does in tracking shots.

‘We wanted to make our subject as exciting as we possibly could,’ Arthur Max, the production designer on Gladiator, has said. ‘Ridley Scott [the director] and I decided we wouldn’t do the classic scholastic Rome… We were more impressed by the romantic vision of Rome by painters such as Alma-Tadema… We tried to emulate the accessories, pageantry, opulence and scale in his paintings.’

Alma-Tadema gave everyone a thrilling reminder that, once upon a time, even the ancient world was fresh and new.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s After the Audience, 1879, is now on view at the National Gallery, London

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