It was thus that some of the most famous of the artist's earlier works were included in this series ordered at so much the half dozen, as if they had been gloves or any article of haberdashery.
It took Alma Tadema four years to carry out Gambart's first commission. When he was at the finish of his task, Gambart once more appeared upon the scene.
"I want you to paint me another twenty-four pictures," was the quaint order given by this dealer—Maecenas again offering to remunerate Alma Tadema at an ascending rate of payment, only this time the starting point was a very much higher figure.
Once more the artist consented. The first work of the new series was the famous Vintage. When the dealer saw it he perceived that it was a far more important canvas than any of its predecessors, a work, too, that had cost the artist far more time and labour, and he at once insisted upon paying for it the figure which was to have been given for the last half dozen. For Gambart, despite his profession and his bizarre ways, was liberal and generous, and perhaps he understood too that it paid to be honest.
Alma Tadema is fond of telling the tale how, when he had finished his second two dozen pictures, Gambart invited him and the whole artistic colony of Brussels to dinner. To our artist's no small surprise, he found that it was he who was the guest of honour. In front of his plate there shone a silver goblet bearing a most flattering inscription, while into his table-napkin was folded a large cheque, a sum accorded to him by Gambart beyond the stipulated price.
An accident brought Tadema to London in 1870, and here he at once took root. A year later he remarried, his wife this time being Miss Laura Theresa Epps, a woman of rare beauty, and herself a painter of distinction.
For many years Tadema's home was in Regent's Park Road, a modest London residence which by his ingenuity he transformed into a fairy palace. He afterwards moved into larger quarters in Grove End Road, where he has reared a house entirely upon his own designs that repeats on a larger and more sumptuous scale the beauties of the earlier residence.
In Alma Tadema's case the environment does indeed explain the man. His keen sense of beauty, his classic tastes, his love of flowers, make themselves felt in every nook and corner of his abode; in the silver-walled studio with its onyx windows, in its mosaic atrium, in which a fountain splashes, in Lady Tadema's special room with its oak-beamed ceiling, its Dutch panelling, its old Dutch furniture, in its low-windowed library packed with splendid illustrated works on artistic themes, in its pretty garden ever gay with blossoms, with its fish pond and trellised colonnade. In almost every room can be reconstructed the scenes of his pictures; the lustrous marble basin in the sky-lit atrium bears upon its sloping rim a heap of withered rose leaves, faintly recording that rich shower of fragrance which once suggested a striking detail in the Heliogabalus picture. The burnished brass steps appearing at frequent intervals figure over and over again in the pictures of Roman villas and classical environments. Perhaps one of the most striking features of this house, which is filled with objects of priceless worth, is its unevenness of pavement. There are such endless nooks and alcoves, each room is conceived upon a different scale and may be lower or higher than its immediate neighbour, and yet, most marvellous of all, the cluster of beautiful apartments perfectly harmonize one with another. From the oblong entrance hall, over whose fireplace runs the greeting,
"I count myself in nothing else so happy
As in a soul remembering my good friends",
whose wall decorations consist in panels painted for the artist by his friends, to the low-lying dining-room, looking upon the garden and shaded by the great tree which it is Tadema's delight to watch in its leaf unfolding, its full summer verdure and its winter gauntness, all is beautiful, all is sympathetic, and all is the result of an ardent appreciation of the artistic possibilities of the most humble objects of domestic life.