Lourens Alma Tademaartist • painter • watercolourist • draughtsmanDronrijp 1836-1912 Wiesbaden (Duitsland)

Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema (1836-1912), the famous painter of the British fin-de-siècle period, was Frisian by birth. Lourens Tadema – Alma was his middle name – received his training in Antwerp with the history painter Henri Leys. He celebrated his greatest triumphs after 1870 in England, where his perfectly executed genre performances, set in ancient Rome and Greece, appealed to the taste of the Victorian upper class. For the decor in which he placed his scenes, Alma Tadema used contemporary publications on classical antiquity and studied archaeological objects in the collection of the British Museum in London. His watercolor technique was extremely refined. He first drew precise contours and then applied many layers of watercolour to achieve the effect of oil paint. In Holland, where his elaborately edited watercolours contrasted sharply with the transparent landscapes of the painters of the Hague School, the painter could not count on much admiration and people were rather sparing about his success. At the request of his cousin Hendrik Willem Mesdag, he did participate several times in exhibitions of the Hollandsche Teekenmaatschappij in The Hague. After his death, Alma-Tadema's work was forgotten for years. With the rise of modern art, few art connoisseurs could appreciate his realistic depictions anymore. In the Netherlands he also largely disappeared into the background in the twentieth century. It was only in the 1980s that interest in his work increased again.

Lourens Tadema was born in the Frisian village of Dronrijp, the son of a notary. After the death of his father - Tadema was only four years old - his mother took care of raising her five children, which also included drawing lessons. Tadema's drawing talent revealed itself at a young age. When he indicates that he wants to continue with this, his family insists that he study law. When he was fifteen he became seriously ill and because it was thought that he would not live much longer, he was allowed to continue drawing and painting. He recovers beyond expectations and the path to becoming an artist is open.

In 1853, Tadema started his training at the Royal Academy of Antwerp. There he was introduced to the history of the Merovingian period through Professor Louis Jean de Taeye. Initially, themes from this era were his favorite subjects. Because there was little interest abroad, he decided in 1858 to switch to a different theme – portraying the benevolent and opulent life in ancient Egypt, Rome and Greece. In 1863 he married the French Marie-Pauline Gressin Dumoulin and after the honeymoon to Rome, Pompeii and Naples his interest in classical antiquity was definitely aroused.

After Pauline's death in 1869, Tadema traveled to London in 1870 for medical advice and met the seventeen-year-old artist Laura Epps, with whom he immediately fell in love. The following year, Alma Tadema decided to move permanently to London, the city he always had a preference for because his work sold well there and to be closer to Laura. With his young daughters Laurence and Anna and his sister Artje, he moves to the English capital, where he soon asks Laura to marry him. Alma Tadema and Laura married in July 1871, he was thirty-four years old, she was only just eighteen. Their marriage was happy, although it remained childless. Laura turned out to be a good stepmother for the two girls who would remain unmarried.

In London, where Alma Tadema would spend the rest of his life, his career quickly took off. He paints what was considered attractive in the strict, etiquette-bound late Victorian era – the luxurious and lavish Greek and Roman daily life, preferably with women dressed in translucent robes, depicted in a setting in which everything is right; clothing, environment, jewelry, furniture. He paints on behalf of wealthy businessmen who have enough money and free time for cultural trips. In his enormous studio home, decorated like a Roman pleasure garden, he holds festive soirees, eagerly attended by artists, customers and intellectuals, in the atmosphere of his paintings. By cleverly linking his middle name to his surname, he is now at the top of the indexes at exhibitions as 'Alma-Tadema'. All this certainly does Alma Tadema no harm. He was one of the highest paid painters of his time, became an esteemed member of the Royal Academy and was ennobled as Sir Lawrence Alma Tadema in 1899. In 1872, Alma Tadema introduced an identification system for his paintings by adding an opus number in Roman numerals under his signature. His wife Laura would also use this system. This made it more difficult to pass off counterfeits as genuine.

Laura's death in 1909 was a major blow to Alma Tadema and his health, which was already not very good, continued to deteriorate. In 1912 he died in Wiesbaden where he was undergoing treatment for a stomach ulcer. He is buried in St. Paul's Cathedral, a great honor for someone who is not of British descent. Tadema's realistic work was forgotten after his death with the rise of modern art. Only after 1973 did interest in his work increase again due to an exhibition that year by the American collector Allen Funt, who was forced to exhibit and sell his 35 Alma-Tademas in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
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