Illustrated:

‘The Sculpture Gallery’ (1875)

The Sculpture Gallery’, is the largest painting ever created by Alma-Tadema. The artist and his family posed for this work, his two daughters Laurence and Anna standing to the right, next to Laura wearing the armlet. The bearded Alma-Tadema sits to the left with his arm outstretched, next to Laura’s sister Ellen Gosse (wife of Sir Edmund Gosse) and brother Dr. Washington Epps. They represent prospective clients or patrons visiting an ancient art gallery or sculptor’s studio. In the background, a colonnaded market-place can be seen, as well as a male figure leaning on a table surrounded by functional objects and decorative works of art.

An enslaved man, recognizable by the crescent-shaped tablet hanging around his neck, displays a basin ornamented with Scylla, the mythological sea-serpent. Identifiable ancient works of art surround the group, including the ‘Infant Hercules Strangling a Snake,” from the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples to the left, and on the right, the seated statue of Helen, mother of Emperor Constantine, from the Capitoline Museum in Rome. It was understood in Alma-Tadema’s day to be a much earlier Roman work representing Agrippina, the wife of Germanicus. The ornately carved marble table, on the right, is from the Casa Rufi in Pompeii on which sits a silver kylix copied from an original that formed part of the Roman treasure found at Hildesheim. The bust of Pericles wearing a Corinthian helmet is from the Vatican Museums.

Tadema’s friend Sir Edward Burne-Jones stated ‘No man has ever lived who has interpreted with Alma-Tadema’s power the incidence of sunlight on metal and marble’, and nowhere is this more aptly demonstrated than in this work. Within a comparatively subtle palette, the glistening qualities of the kylix and of the sculptural snake bracelet are testimony to his technical prowess, as are the rich properties of marble evident in the contrasting treatments of the pillar supporting the Scylla basin, the carved table, and the ‘Infant Hercules’.

The work was commissioned by Alma-Tadema’s agent Gambart for his villa in Nice; it took only a year to complete, which was remarkable given its scale and complexity. It was exhibited at a number of international exhibitions including the Paris Salon of 1874, the Berlin Royal Academy the same year (where it won a gold medal), the Royal Academy in 1875, and at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle.

‘The Sculpture Gallery’ (1875)

A much smaller painting with the same subject but slight variations to accessories and background was commissioned again by Alma-Tadema’s agent Gambart in 1875. The marble pedestal on the back wall has been engraved with a Latin inscription indicating that the Augustan era has just begun. This painting was to be the last of a series of ancient sculpture and painting gallery pictures. After his excursion to Rome in the winter of 1876-7, the artist seemed less interested in the overt use of known subjects from classical antiquity in his paintings, his expertise allowing him to invent some of the ancient objects himself.

The painting was reproduced on the slip case of the biography and catalogue raisonné devoted to Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema by Vern G. Swanson, published in 1990.

‘The Roses of Heliogabulus’ (1888)

The painting tells the story of Heliogabalus, the debauched Emperor of Rome (218-23). Whilst hosting a banquet, he instructed the loosening of a velarium canopy so that his guests would be smothered in a cascade of rose petals. Wearing pontifical robes and a tiara, the Emperor reclines at the upper table with his mother, Saemius, and other garlanded guests. A female figure plays the double pipes beside a marble pillar in the background, wearing the leopard skin of a maenad. A bronze statue of Dionysus with Panther and Satyr, based on the marble example in the Ludovisi Collection, stands in the background with a view of hills in the distance.

The featured tale is probably an invented episode of the Emperor’s life,, taken from the Historia Augusta; although the Latin refers to ‘violets and other flowers’, Alma-Tadema preferred the depiction of rose petals released from a false ceiling. As they were out of season in London, Alma Tadema is reputed to have had rose petals sent from the South of France each week during the four months it took to paint it. The sensorial experience of the floating petals and associated perfume emanating from them distracts the viewer from the fact that they are suffocating the Emperor’s guests.

Commissioned in 1888 by Sir John Aird, 1st Baronet for the substantial sum of £4,000, it was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition that same year. The work was reproduced in La Gazette des Beaux Arts, the Art Journal, and The Magazine of Art, where it was hailed as a ‘masterpiece of execution …in some respects the painter’s ‘chef-d’oeuvre’.

When Aird died in 1911, the work was inherited by his son; a memorial exhibition took place devoted to Sir Alma-Tadema in 1913, a year after the death of the artist, and it was lent to the Royal Academy for the occasion. The next time it was seen publicly in London was in 2014, when the Pérez Simón collection, which includes this masterpiece, was shown at Leighton House as part of an exhibition entitled ‘A Victorian Obsession’.

‘The Frigidarium’ (1890)

The armlet is featured as a prop in ‘The Frigidarium’, placed on a shelf in an alcove to the right of the main subject, once again modelled by Laura.

The painting depicts the cold water section of a Roman thermae at the time of Hadrian. A balneatrix adjusts the girdle of a patrician maiden, whilst another draws back a richly coloured embroidered curtain in the passageway to allow a semi-nude maiden to pass into the apodyterium from her sunny, but cold, bath outside. The theme of Roman baths was used no less than seventeen times by the artist, from 1875 to 1909.