LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA At Home in Antiquity

Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings were immensely popular among his contemporaries, and have since enchanted a wide audience through the medium of cinema. Anyone who has ever enjoyed the great epic films—from Italian silent classics to Cecil B. Demille to Ridley Scott’s Gladiator—will instantly recognize their origins in sets and costumes Alma-Tadema invented. Accompanied by glowing reproductions of the artist’s rich and detailed works, this book boldly re-assesses Alma-Tadema’s art. The theme here is the idea of Alma-Tadema and home: from his admiration for the interiors depicted in early Dutch paintings through his fascination with Pompeian ruins, to his creation of large studio houses that were artworks in their own right. Building upon his renown as ”the archaeologist of artists,” the new scholarship in this impressive volume shows how the spaces he created and inhabited with his talented artist-wife Laura and their two daughters reflected an aesthetic vision that has thrilled viewers and other artists for more than a century. Rare photographs are juxtaposed with original paintings as well as drawings and studies. Although this popular artist has been examined in previous books, this presents him from a different perspective, going as far as showing work by his predecessors and contemporaries--an entire chapter examines his influence on the young Gustav Klimt; another examines "Frederic Leighton and Lawrence Alma-Tadema." With origins in the work of the Pre-Raphaelites, Alma-Tadema went his own way, taking the PRB aesthetics but applying them to gorgeous pictures of antiquity, from sensual Roman baths and nude bathers, to brightly clothed women, hand-painted benches, shining marble and ocean vistas, all with a theme of romance and beauty, recreating an idealized world of the past. Out Of Print. Condition: Fine Plus. Two softly bumped corners.