Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity

Delightful exhibition at Leighton House Museum looking at the life and work of Lawrence Alma-Tadema.

It was lovely that these works were shown throughout this beautiful house so that some were seen in the sort of aesthetic setting for which they were painted. There was a useful booklet with all the labels in but it took me a while to realise there were also room guides giving more background on some of the main works. I’d thought they were just guides to the rooms themselves. I also missed out on the tape which might have filled in a bit more of the background information.

I was fascinated to see Alma-Tadema’s early work which placed him in the Flemish tradition he had been born into and included a lovely early self-portrait. The second room looked at his honeymoon in Pompeii and the almost overnight effect this had on his work. I loved the imagined Roman scenes populated with Victorian faces.

He moved to London in 1869 on the death of his first wife where he met Laura Epps and was soon married again. Laura was also an artists and it was nice that the show included works by her and his daughter Anna. I got an impression of a close family bound together by art. There were good sections on their two houses in London, Townsend House and Grove End Road with lovely photographs and paintings and objects which had been in them. I particularly liked a series of panels he had asked friends to paint for door panels which included works by Leighton, Val Prinsep and Sargent.

The paintings were a bit sugary but I got pulled into them particularly enjoying spotting regularly used objects and furniture. You can’t help but like the wonderful sense of heat and colour in the classical subjects. It was nice to see “The Roses of Heliogablus” again which is still on loan from Mexico. My favourite picture was a wonderful man’s back from a picture now in sections of “Hadrian in Britain” which was hanging on the stairs reunited with two other sections from the picture.

Closes on 29 October 2017

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