Sir Laurens Alma Tadema (1836-1912)
[Laurens Alma Tadema, Laurens Alma-Tadema]

Pupil of:

Wappers, Dykmans, Baron Leys and De Taye

Laurens Alma-Tadema, one of the foremost figure painters of the century, and one of the most successful in every material sense, was born in Belgium, at the town of Drourp in the province of Friesland, in 1836. His father was a notary, with a quite prosperous practice, and, purposing that his son should continue his business, he educated him with this point in view. The boy was sent to the college at Leeuwarden, and in his leisure from school carefully trained to the office duties of his father's profession. But the art spirit woke in him early, and asserted itself against all parental objections and restraints. He practiced drawing secretly. He made experiments in color. He pored over the engravings and the old missals in the college and the public library. He was particularly fascinated at the college lectures by those which related to the Greek and Roman antiquity, and while his father believed that he was acquiring the knowledge necessary for a provincal lawyer, he was laying the foundations for a knowledge which was to render him a greater and wealthier man than his plodding parent ever dreamed of being. At last his pentup love for art broke forth with irresistible force. He was sixteen years of age. It was time for him to go to work in the notary's office. He refused. His father yielded to his supplications, and sent him to the Antwerp Academy to become a painter. He commenced to study at Antwerp in 1852, when Wappers and Dykmans were the professors at the Academy. In 1859 he left the Academy and entered the studio of Baron Leys. Such a school suited such a scholar as Alma-Tadema, and he calls himself to-day a pupil of Leys and De Taye. In 1861 he exhibited his first really worthy original picture, and it was purchased by the King of the Belgians. This gave him not only profit but encouragement and the commencement of a reputation. He travelled in Germany, Italy, France; visited London; studied the works in the great collections everywhere, and worked unceasingly himself. He made a special study of classical art and literature, and gradually, but slowly, and only as his knowledge increased, and he felt certain of his material, gravitated towards the field of subjects to which he eventually devoted himself and upon which his fame rests. He was already prosperous, for his pictures sold from the easel, when he married the daughter of a wealthy English manufacturer, whom he had met on one of his numerous visits to London. His wife, herself, possessed strong artistic talent, and under his tutelage has become so good a painter that the name Laura Alma-Tadema is now sought for in the catalogues of the London exhibitions. In 1871 he settled in London, having previously had his studio in Brussels, and in London he remains, in spite of the fact that the dynamite explosion of Regent's Park in 1874 destroyed his house and his fine classical art collection, and compelled him to build a newer - and much more palatial - home.

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MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE.

Vol. XIII.   August 1895.   No. 5.   p.451

June 1898:
Laurens Alma-Tadema is so healthy looking and so healthy minded that he has never fallen under the imputation of trying to "live the life of the beautiful Greeks," and yet, oddily enough, that is exactly what he succeeds in doing, at least so far as surroundings are concerned. His pictures of antique life could almost all of them be painted from a model placed somewhere about his own house and grounds. He is a Dutchman, born in Friesland, and his earliest pictures were of German life in the early middle ages. This was followed by a Pompeian period, and then the elaborate representations of the life of ancient Greece and Rome. But it has been since 1870, when he went to England, and married the enormously rich Miss Epps of the cocoa fortune, that he has been able to realize his dreams of ancient grandeur in his surroundings. He built a London house on the north side of Regent's Park, which is filled with the cool marbles, the frescoes, and the decorations which his pictures have taught us to know.