A Victorian invasion of ancient Rome
Alma-tadema: At Home in Antiquity Leighton House Museum, London W14
One of Britain’s most popular artists through much of the 19th century, Sir Lawrence Almatadema became something of a joke in the 20th. The Dutch-born painter’s painstaking recreations of domestic life in the classical world, with their strong-limbed viragos waiting for homecoming heroes and half-naked slave girls sprawled on tiger-skin rugs, came to exemplify the quaint irrelevance of Victorian art and culture in the age of modernism.
Rather than attempting to reinstate Alma-tadema as a neglected great with a particular relevance for our times, this intriguing exhibition immerses us in his domestic and professional world. It transposes the atmosphere and domestic detail of Tadema’s studio-house in St John’s Wood into the Kensington domicile of another long derided high-victorian celebrity painter: Lord Leighton, Alma-tadema’s friend.
You could hardly have a more atmospheric setting for an exhibition of this kind than Leighton House, with the 130-odd exhibits – paintings, furniture and photographs – ranged through sumptuous rooms around the spectacular tiled Arab court and majestic peacock staircase.
Born in northern Holland in 1836, Alma-tadema trained at a time when “history painting” – images drawing a moral lesson from history or literature – was considered the highest form of art, and knowledge of the visual style of other eras was considered at least as important as painterly technique.
His early paintings, depicting scenes of medieval France, display a rather cumbersome mixture of neoclassical monumentality and frantic Preraphaelite detail. But on a visit to the ruins of Pompeii in 1863, he discovered his great subject: archaeologically accurate recreations of life in antiquity, viewed not through the deeds of mythical heroes and philosophers, but via the daily round of ordinary people. The pathos of these images lies in the fact that Alma-tadema’s ancient Romans are all patently Victorian Britons.
Entrance to a Roman Theatre, in which a Roman “cab” – a cross between a chariot and a Hansom – drops off an aristocratic family, while painted in Brussels, could pass for a 19th century London scene in which everyone just happens to be wearing ancient Roman dress. The gesticulations of the “barman” to his toga-clad customers in The Wine Shop could have come straight from some East End boozer.
Moving to London in 1870, after the death of his first wife and only son, Alma-tadema married the 18-year-old Laura Epps. Under his tutelage, she too became a painter, and the pair set about what the exhibition describes as “time-travelling” through their art.
In The Nurse, Laura depicts her own birth labour, transposed to 17th century Holland, the period with which she was obsessed, while in Alma-tadema’s A Hearty Welcome, the family appear as Ancient Romans. The show climaxes with a roomful of late works, dominated by the extraordinary The Roses of Heliogabalus, regarded now as his signature work and showing a little known incident from late Roman history, in which an emperor smothered his dinner guests in rose petals. If Alma-tadema naturally disapproves of this cruel excess, boy does he have fun painting it. Clouds of pink petals float over the faces of the leering emperor and his cronies, depicted with a near-photographic realism; combined with the uniform pink colour, it brings a curious, but inescapable flavour of the advertising poster or the department store window display. The faces of the guests expiring in the sea of flowers below are, of course, those of wellbred young Victorian ladies. As British power approached its zenith, Almatadema created images of the ancient empire that provided the model for Britain’s modern imperial adventure, in which the Victorians themselves played the starring roles. The touching fact behind this evocative exhibition is that we can perceive that in a way that they, and indeed he, never could.