Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was born as Laurens Tadema on January 8, 1836, in the small village of Dronrijp, in Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. He was the sixth child of Pieter Jiltes Tadema (1797-1840), the village notary, who had had three sons by a previous marriage, and the third child of his mother, Hinke Dirks Brouwer (c 1800-1863). Hinke Brouwer was the half sister of Pieter Tadema's first wife. Her first child died early and the second was Atje ( c1834-c1876), Laurence' sister, for whom he had great affection. Tadema, (meaning Adam-son), was an old Frisian patronymic ending with the suffix 'ma' - 'son of' while the names Laurens and Alma belonged to the boy's godfather. Laurens would later changed his name to the more English Lawrence, and incorporated Alma into his surname in order to have his name appear at the beginning of exhibition catalogues, under A rather than under T. He did not actually hyphenate his last name, but it was done by others and this has since become the convention.

The Tadema family moved in 1838 to the near town of Leeuwarden, where Pieter's position as a notary would be more lucrative. His father died when Laurens was four, leaving his mother with five children: Laurens, his sister, and three boys from his father's first marriage. His mother had artistic leanings, and decided that drawing lessons should be incorporated into the children's education. He received his first art training with a local drawing master hired to teach his older half-brothers.

It was intended that the boy would become a lawyer; but in 1851 at the age of fifteen he suffered a physical and mental breakdown. Diagnosed as consumptive; given only a short time to live, he was allowed to spend his remaining days at his leisure, drawing and painting. Left to his own devices he regained his health and decided to pursue a career as an artist. In 1852 he entered The Royal Academy of Antwerp where he studied early Dutch and Flemish art, under Egide Charles Gustave Wappers. During Alma-Tadema's four years as a registered student at the Academy, he won several respectable awards. (ctd below]

Alma-Tadema: The_Roses_of_Heliogabalus

Romantic themes were the painter's favorite subject up to the mid-1860's. However Merovingian subjects did not have a wide international appeal, so he switched to themes of life in ancient Egypt that were more popular. On these scenes of Frankish and Egyptian life Alma-Tadema spent great energy and much research. In 1862 Alma-Tadema left Leys's studio and started his own career, establishing himself as a significant classical- subject European artist.

1863 was to alter the course of Alma-Tadema's personal and professional life: on January 3 his invalid mother died, and on September 24 he was married, in Antwerp City Hall, to Marie-Pauline Gressin, the daughter of Eugene Gressin, a French journalist of royal descent living near Brussels. Nothing is known of their meeting and little of Pauline herself, as Alma-Tadema never spoke about her after her death in 1869. Her image appears in a number of oils, though he painted her portrait only three times, the most notable appearing in My studio (1867). The couple had three children. Their eldest and only son died in childhood. Their two daughters, Laurence (1864-1940) and Anna (1867-1943), both had artistic leanings: the former in literature, the latter in art. Neither would marry. Alma-Tadema and his wife spent their honeymoon in Florence, Rome, Naples and Pompeii. This, his first visit to Italy, developed his interest in depicting the life of ancient Greece and Rome, especially the latter since he found new inspiration in the ruins of Pompeii, which fascinated him and would inspire much of his work in the coming decades.

During the summer of 1864, Tadema met Ernest Gambart, the most influential art dealer and impresario of the nineteenth century. Gambart was highly impressed with the work of Tadema, who was then painting: Egyptian chess players (1865). The dealer recognizing at once the unusual gifts of the young painter: he gave him an order for twenty-four pictures and arranged for three of Tadema's paintings to be shown in London. In 1865, Tadema relocated to Brussels where he was named a knight of the Order of Leopold I. On May 28 1869, Pauline died at Schaerbeek, in Belgium, at the age of 32, after several years of illness . Her death left Tadema severly depressed. He ceased painting for months. His sister Artje, who lived with the family, helped with the little girls then 2 and 4.

Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco
The Itinerant Harpist, etching, 1878

Fitzwilliam Museum at the University of Cambridge, UK

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles
Spring, 1894

Musée d'Orsay Collection Database, Paris NEW!
2 works online

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Paintings collection online

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Death of the Pharaoh's Firstborn Son, 1872

Rijksmuseum Research Database, Amsterdam (in Dutch)
4 works online

Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
2 paintings online

Art Gallery of the University of Rochester, New York
The Sculpture Gallery

Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, UK

Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery, UK
Autumn Vintage Festival, 1877

Bowes Museum, County Durham, UK
Catherine, Duchess of Cleveland

Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, England
Courtship (The Proposal), 1892

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, UK
Unconscious Rivals

Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Cecil French Bequest Gallery, London, UK

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
Pianoforte and Pair of Stools

Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, Massachusetts
The Women of Amphissa, 1887

Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
Glaucus and Nydia

Dahesh Museum, New York City (Zoomable) NEW!
3 works online

Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands (in Dutch)

Flemish Art Collection Database (in Dutch) NEW!

Harvard University Art Museums, Massachusetts NEW!

Hood Museum of Art, New Hampshire

Joconde Database of French Museum Collections (in French)

Manchester City Art Gallery, UK

Museum Bredius, Netherlands

Museum of the Origins of the Polish State, Gniezno, Poland (in Polish)
(Site may be a little buggy)

National Museums and Galleries of Wales
Poetry, 1879
Prose, 1879

National Museums Liverpool, UK
A Bacchante

National Museums Liverpool, UK
The Tepidarium

National Portrait Gallery, London, UK

Philadelphia Museum of Art
A Reading from Homer

Royal Academy of Arts Online Catalogue
"Artist of the Month" profile

Royal Academy of Arts Online Catalogue
3 works online

State Museums of Florence Digital Archive, Italy NEW!

Tate Gallery, London, UK

The Walters Art Museum, Maryland
Sappho and Alcaeus

Tyne & Wear Museums, England NEW!
Love in Idleness, 1891

Tyne & Wear Museums Zoomable Database, England NEW!
Love In Idleness, Love's Votaries

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Exhausted Maenads after the Dance, 1874

During the summer Tadema himself began to suffer from a medical problem which doctors in Brussels were frustratingly unable to diagnose. Gambart eventually advised him to go to England for another medical opinion. Soon after his arrival in London in December 1869, Alma-Tadema was invited to the home of the painter Ford Madox Brown. There he met the seventeen years old Laura Theresa Epps and fell in love with her at first sight.

The outbreak of the Franco Prussian War in July 1870 compelled Alma-Tadema to leave the continent and move to London. His infatuation with Laura Epps played a great part in his relocation to England and Gambart felt that the move would be advantageous to the artist's career. In stating his reasons for the move, Tadema simply said: I lost my first wife, a French lady with whom I married in 1863, in 1869. Having always had a great predilection for London, the only place where, up till then my work had met with buyers, I decided to leave the continent and go to settle in England, where I have found a true home.

With his small daughters and sister Artje, Alma-Tadema arrived in London at the beginning of September 1870. The painter wasted no time in contacting Laura, and it was arranged that he would give her painting lessons. During one of these, he proposed marriage. As he was then thirty-four and Laura was now only eighteen, her father was initially opposed to the idea. Dr Epps finally agreed on the condition that they should wait until they knew each other better. They married in July 1871. Laura, under her married name, also won a high reputation as an artist, and appears in numerous of Alma-Tadema's canvases after their marriage (The Women of Amphissa (1887) being a notable example). This second marriage was enduring and happy, though childless, and Laura became stepmother to Anna and Laurence.

Alma-Tadema: Silver Favourites (1903)

After his arrival in England, where he was to spend the rest of his life, Alma-Tadema's career was one of continued success. He became one of the most famous and highly paid artists of his time, acknowledged and rewarded. By 1871 he had met and befriended most of the major Pre-Raphaelite painters and it was in part due to their influence that the artist brightened his palette, varigated hues and lightened his brushwork. In 1873 Alma-Tadema became a naturalized British subject.

The previous year he and his wife made a journey on the Continent that lasted five and a half months and took them through Brussels, Germany, and Italy. In Italy they were able to take-in the ancient ruins again; this time he purchased several photographs, mostly of the ruins, which began his immense collection of folios with archival material sufficient for the documentation used in the completion of future paintings. In January 1876, he rented a studio in Rome. The family returned to London in April, visiting the Parisian Salon on their way back.

Among the most important of his pictures during this period was An Audience at Agrippa's (1876). When an admirer of the painting offered to pay a substantial sum for a painting with a similar theme, Alma-Tadema simply turned the emperor around to show him leaving in After the Audience.

On June 19, 1879, Alma-Tadema was made a full Academician, his most important award. Three years later a retrospective of his oeuvre was organized at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, including 185 of his pictures. In 1883 he returned to Rome and Pompeii, where further excavations had taken place since his last visit. He spent a significant amount of time studying the site daily. These excursions gave him an ample source of subject matter. At times, however, he integrated so many objects into his paintings that some said they resembled museum catalogues. One of his most famous paintings is The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) based on an episode from the life of the infamously debauched Roman Emperor Elagabalus (Heliogabalus), the painting depicts the psychopathic Emperor suffocating his guest at an orgy under a cascade of rose petals. The blossoms depicted were sent weekly to the artist's London studio from the Riviera for four months during the winter of 1887- 1888.

Among Alma-Tadema's works of this period are: An Earthly Paradise (1891), Unconscious Rivals (1893) Spring (1894), The Coliseum (1896) and The Baths of Caracalla (1899).