Lourens Tadema was born on 8 January 1836 in the village of Dronrijp in Friesland in the Netherlands. His father was a notary public. It was intended that the boy would become a lawyer; but in 1851 at the age of 15, he was diagnosed as consumptive; given only a short time to live and allowed to spend his remaining days at 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, De Keyser, and later under Baron Leys. During his four years as a registered student at the Academy, he won several awards. In 1863 his invalid mother died and on 24 September that year, he was married in Antwerp City Hall to Marie-Pauline Gressin. They honeymooned at Pompeii. She unfortunately died at the young age of 32 in 1869 and Tadema moved to England in 1870 to escape the Franco-Prussian War. He then became arguably the most successful painter of the Victorian era. For over 60 years he gave his audience exactly what it wanted; distinctive, elaborate paintings of beautiful people in classical settings. His incredibly detailed reconstructions of the daily life of ancient Rome, with languid men and women posed against white marble in dazzling sunlight provided his audience with a glimpse of a world of the kind they might one day construct for themselves, at least in attitude, if not in detail. He changed his surname to Alma-Tadema, to ensure that he always appeared first in the exhibition catalogues. His paintings were commissioned in bulk by the dealer Ernst Gambart, who encouraged him to concentrate on the highly saleable Classical paintings. Alma-Tadema generally contrasted archaeologically accurate detail with aggressively modern figures and attitudes. He was also the most gifted exponent among Victorian painters in rendering exactly textures, surfaces and colours. Alma-Tadema met Laura Epps when she was a student of Ford Madox Brown and they were married in 1871. He was naturalised as a British subject in 1873. He became an Associate of the Old Water-Colour Society in 1873, a Member in 1875, was elected ARA in 1876 and RA in 1879. His Diploma Work was The Way to the Temple (1882). He was appointed Chevalier of the Legion of Honour by the French government in 1873, knighted in 1899 and appointed by his sovereign King Edward VII to the Order of Merit in 1905. Alma-Tadema would produce more than 400 known works and he also enjoyed some success as a designer of musical instruments. Alma-Tadema was a perfectionist and worked assiduously to make the most of his paintings, often repeatedly reworking parts of paintings, before finding them satisfactory to his own high standards. He was sensitive to every detail and architectural line of his paintings, as well as the settings he was depicting. Such was his attention to detail, that whilst working on one of his Imperial Roman story-pictures, he had fresh roses shipped to him from the south of France weekly for four months to get the petals right. It was that kind of commitment to veracity that earned him recognition, but also caused his adversaries to take up arms against his almost encyclopaedic works. His ambitious Spring (1895), with a procession of dozens of children and women bearing flowers and musical instruments, overlooked by marble buildings and spectators tossing more flowers, was described by the Magazine of Art as ‘a wonderful picture of colour, figures, movement, blue sky, marble, a hundred beautiful accessories exquisitely painted… he has improved on the splendour of the buildings as he has improved on the demeanour of the populace… there is here no hint of ‘excessive merriment, drinking and lascivious games’; all is perfectly respectable, gorgeous and exquisitely beautiful.’ One of his earliest influences included the famous Egyptologist George Ebers and from early in his career, Alma-Tadema was particularly concerned with architectural accuracy, often including objects that he had seen at museums – such as the British Museum in London – in his works. Unlike many Victorian painters, his works were without complicated themes or moral lessons and were criticised for being lacking in any spirituality, and for depicting ‘Victorians dressed up in ancient costume’ (Laura Tadema, who often modelled for him was accused of being ‘too fat in the ankles’). He amassed an enormous collection of photographs from ancient sites in Italy, which he used as references for the most precise accuracy in the details of his compositions. At his peak, Alma-Tadema rivalled Frederic Leighton in reputation. However, when the Victorian epoch ended, so did Alma-Tadema’s marketability. Paintings which previously would have sold for 10,000 pounds became impossible to sell at all. In fact, some of his paintings could have been had for as little as 20 pounds at that time. His friendships with the Prince of Wales and the young Winston Churchill faded and his artistic legacy all but vanished. The critic and all-round genius John Ruskin unkindly and inaccurately declared him ‘the worst painter of the 19th century’. One critic remarked that his paintings were ‘about worthy enough to adorn bourbon boxes.’ Alma Tadema died on 25 June 1912 at Wiesbaden in Germany. He was buried in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral, alongside such greats of his era as Leighton, Millais and Holman Hunt. After a period of being denounced, he was condemned to relative obscurity for many years. A good selection of his works may be found in the collection of the Tate. His remarkable nude The Tepidarium (1881) may be found in the Lady Lever Art Gallery at Port Sunlight. Most surprisingly, the work was owned by the soap manufacturer A and F Pears, before being sold to Lord Leverhulme in 1916. His intimate Portrait of Sir Ernest A Waterlow, RA, (1889) was presented to the RA by Lady Waterlow in 1920. Waterlow was a close friend of Alma-Tadema and the painting was possibly part of an exchange of works between the two artists. When it was exhibited at the Academy in 1890 a reviewer found it ‘a singularly natural and unaffected piece of portraiture’. A number of his portraits executed in the 1890s may be found in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery. It was not until 1973 that a biography was produced by Russell Ash and not until 1990, that a full colour book containing large prints of his paintings was published. In 1980 a piano he designed for Henry Marquand of New York made £177,273 at auction, making it to date, not only the most expensive such musical instrument ever sold, but also the most costly example of 19th-century applied art. One little-noticed side effect of Alma-Tadema’s vision of the ancient world was that it would be faithfully replicated in such epics of the big screen as D W Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Ben Hur (1926), Cecil B DeMille’s Cleopatra (1934) and The Ten Commandments (1956). Alma-Tadema’s Ask Me No More is illustrated above.