The Archaeologist Of Artists

Dominic Green looks at the sensual paintings of the acclaimed Victorian artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema currently on show at Leighton House in London.

From his election as Royal Academician in 1878 to his death in 1912, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s carefully structured canvases – elegant in architecture, romantic in narrative, lush in pigment and rich in sensuality – defined the Graeco-Roman past for most high to middle-brow members of the public. He was well paid, popular and – despite John Ruskin’s reservations – tolerated, if not praised, by the critics. But, when Victorian art fell out of fashion during the early 20th century, the reputation of Alma-Tadema declined, too.

In 1955, an anonymous couple bought Alma-Tadema’s lavish processional The Finding of Moses, 1904 from a London dealer – for its frame. According to legend, the buyers left the canvas in the alley outside the gallery with the rubbish.

Five years later The Finding of Moses found its way back to Christie’s, but neither it nor its new frame could find a buyer.

Then, in the 1960s, the hedonist hipppies ransacked the Victorian dressing-up box and brought 19th-century art out of the attic and it became fashionable again.

By 1973, The Finding of Moses was on show at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, one of many works by Alma-Tadema amassed by Allen Funt, the producer of the television comedy show, Candid Camera. Although the Met rather disowned its show, entitling it Victorians in Togas, like Constantine’s Rome, Alma-Tadema continued to rise from his fall. In 2010, Sotheby’s in New York sold The Finding of Moses to an anonymous buyer for $35,922,500.