Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity

The largest exhibition devoted to the celebrated Victorian artist to be held in London since 1913, explores Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s fascination with the representation of domestic life in antiquity and how this interest related to his own domestic circumstances expressed through the two remarkable studio-houses that he created in St John’s Wood together with his wife Laura and daughters.

Born in the north of the Netherlands, the exhibition traces his early training and move to London in 1870 where he established a hugely successful career at the heart of the artistic establishment. His work fixed ideas in the popular imagination of what life in the ancient past ‘looked like’ – ideas and images that were taken to the stage, film and that remain with us today. The exhibition includes important works by Tadema himself, his wife Laura and daughter Anna with loans coming from public and private collections internationally.

At Home in Antiquity finds a perfect setting in Leighton’s own studio-house, interiors known to the Alma-Tademas as frequent callers and includes In My Studio, presented by Alma-Tadema to Leighton as a token of his esteem; also The Finding of Moses (1904) and The Roses of Heliogabalus(1888), two of his largest and most celebrated works.