This theme, with considerable variants, had been treated once before by Tadema. Indeed, he is fond of repeating his initial idea in different shape. This time the work is called Antistius Labeon. It represents an amateur Roman painter, a contemporary of Vespasian, showing off his latest productions to the friends who have dropped into his studio. It seems, so Tadema tells us, that the gentleman painter, who was a Roman pro-consul, was rather looked down upon by his contemporaries for his amateur tastes. It was thought gentlemanly in those days to admire art but not to practise it, an idea that even in early Victorian days we find not quite extinct.
AT THE SHRINE OF VENUS.
It was on these two fine works, The Sculpture Gallery and The Picture Gallery, that Alma Tadema's world-wide reputation was first based. A great continental dealer bought them, and as engravings as well as in the widely exhibited originals they became familiar to all lovers of the beautiful. From this time onward Alma Tadema could not paint fast enough to satisfy the demands made upon his brush; but this success only increased the rigidity of the demands he made upon himself. The more successful Alma Tadema has been, the more conscientious has he become, a rare quality, and one that cannot be too highly praised or too much admired. His passionate love of colour, a passion that seems to have grown upon him as time passed, and as he abandoned more and more his earlier drier manner, found expression after his election as associate to the Royal Academy in a number of small but most perfect little canvases that often dealt with nothing in particular, and to which the artist was at times embarrassed to give names, or whose titles, when found, were not specially distinctive, but which each in their kind was a perfect gem of technique of radiant tints. And after all, why need a picture have a name, Ã tout prix? Whistler was not so wrong when he labelled some of his works as "Symphonies" and "Harmonies" of colour. Such titles would best describe many of Alma Tadema's smaller colour creations.
And now, his own line fully found, Tadema worked on steadily, without haste or pause. In a milieu far distant indeed from the scene of their creation, a London atmosphere, a London sky, he caused to live again for a while in effigy the men and maidens of Magna Graecia, of Rome, of Parthenope, and above all of Sicily, for Tadema's out-door scenes are too southern in feeling and in tone even for the furthest shores of the Peninsula, and belong by rights to the Syren isle. Here alone are found the unclouded sapphire skies, the seas sun-bathed and innocent of angry waves, the luxuriant vegetation, the mad wealth of roses that seem to spring by magic from Tadema's brush, and are the outcome of his fervid imagination that can behold these things with his mental vision while fog and grim winter are raging outside. It is one of Tadema's rare and precious gifts that he can see his picture finished before he has put brush to canvas. It is this gift which makes it unnecessary for him to execute the usual amount of sketching, indeed, Tadema may be said not to sketch at all; it is this that lends to his hand his rare security, and this that helps towards his precision of execution. Everything is clearly, sharply outlined in his art. His canvases show no quiet, slumberous distances, no mysterious twilights of life or nature. All is evident, all is distinct, all sharply defined as in the meridional landscape that he loves, and all this is rendered with that accuracy, with those small touches of extreme sharpness, which recall the precise methods of his Dutch pictorial ancestors. These are merits, but they are merits that also contain hidden within their excellence the germs of what by some may be considered as defects. There is apt to be a lack of repose about a picture of Alma Tadema's, our eye is not necessarily led at once to the central purpose of the work, each action seems of equal importance, and is painted in the same scheme of values.
As an example of Alma Tadema's painstaking, and of how he lets no trouble or expense stand in the way of making his pictures just as perfect as possible, it may be mentioned that during the whole of the winter when he was at work on his Heliogabalus the artist sent twice a week for boxes of fresh roses from the Riviera. Thus each flower may be said to have been painted from a different model.
Only once in his life did Alma Tadema paint a life-size nude figure. This was the work called A Sculptor's Model. It was inspired by the Venus of the Esquiline, then but lately unearthed; the painter's intention was to show, as far as possible, the conditions under which such a masterpiece might have been created. It was also painted as a model for his pupil John Collier, one of the very few pupils whom Alma Tadema has ever received into his studio.
It should be mentioned that Alma Tadema at times paints in water colours as well as in oils, a medium he manipulates most successfully, and which lends itself most admirably to his limpid effects of sea and sky. He has also of late years taken to portrait painting. His wonderfully careful technique has here full play, and the perfection of finish fills us with admiration. But, despite their merits, it is hard to think of these portraits as Alma Tadema's; with his name, whether we will or no, we are forced to associate blue skies, placid seas, spring flowers, youths and maidens in the heyday of life, and a sense of old-world happiness and distance from our less beautiful modern existence and surroundings.