In those days, Tadema and Burne-Jones were scarcely acquainted. Their real friendship came a little later, but when it came it was very genuine and sincere, resting on a certain quality of simplicity which they owned in common and a strong feeling of mutual respect and esteem. Their ways in art lay far asunder, but each knew how to value at their true worth the gifts of the other. From time to time they would both join me in little Bohemian feasts at Previtali’s Restaurant in Coventry Street, where we would sit till the closing hours in pleasant converse that was never permitted to be protractedly serious. Tadema generally prefaced the evening with an anecdote which he always believed to be entirely new, and even when its hoary antiquity was not in doubt, Burne-Jones never failed to supply a full measure of the laughing appreciation that was due to novelty. In his more serious moods, however, Tadema’s talk was marked by deep conviction and entire sincerity. He never acquired complete mastery over our language, but he could always find the word or phrase that reached the heart of what he wanted to say. In his art, no less than in his views on art and life, he was desperately in earnest, and there was something even in the quality of his voice that aptly mirrored the mind and character of the man. Indeed, to be quite correct, it was not one voice, but two, for sometimes even within the compass of a single sentence the tone would swiftly change from the guttural notes that betrayed his northern origin to those softer cadences that seemed to echo from some southern belfry.
I have often thought that this contrast of intonation in his speech reflected in a measure the dual influences that dominated his painting. By his heart’s desire, he belonged to a land that was not the land of his birth and to an epoch far removed from the present. The call of the spirit led him backward and southward—to the streets of ancient Rome and the sunlit shores of the Mediterranean; but, for all his journeyings, his genius as a painter remained securely domiciled under northern skies. The saving grace of his art, whatever the material upon which it was employed, differed little, indeed, from that which gives its surviving charm to the art of his countryman De Hoogh. Both will live in virtue of their unfailing love of light. It is that, or, at least, that above all else, that will make their achievements delightful and indestructible. “No man has ever lived,” Burne-Jones once said to me, “who has interpreted with Tadema’s power the incidence of sunlight on metal and marble.” And although Tadema left the simple interiors of De Hoogh far behind him in his learned reconstruction of the buildings of antiquity, it was with a temper and purpose closely allied to that of De Hoogh that he loved to revel in quaintly-chosen effects of light and shade, admitting sometimes only the tiniest corner of the full sunshine from the outer world, just to illumine as with the dazzling brilliance of a jewel the imprisoned half-tones that flood the foregrounds of his pictures.
To those who can look below the surface, this central quality of his genius, which he inherited as part of his birthright, will be found reappearing in unbroken continuity throughout the splendid series of his work that lately adorned the walls of Burlington House. Their fertile invention, and the strong and vivid sense of drama that often moves that invention; the patient industry and wide learning which have served to recreate the classic environment wherein his chosen characters live and have their being—these things would count for little in the final impression left by his art, if he had not carried with him in all his wanderings into the past and towards the south, that vitalising principle of light, which, in hands fitly inspired, is able to bestow even upon inanimate things a pulsing and sentient existence. “There is nothing either beautiful or ugly,” as Constable once said, “but light and shade makes it so.” Alma-Tadema had learnt this secret long ago, when he was little more than a boy, and before he had quitted his native land, and he retained it to the very end of his career.
This is not the occasion to appraise at its full value the worth of Tadema’s artistic achievement, nor would even those who are his warmest admirers seek to deny that in many of its aspects it is open to criticism. But at a time when the antics of the charlatan are invading almost every realm of art, his patient and unswerving loyalty to a chosen ideal stands forth as a shining example to all who may come after him. That his powers in the region of design confessed some inherent limitations he himself was entirely conscious. I remember one day when we were discussing the claims of several of his contemporaries, he said to me suddenly, “You know, my dear fellow, there are some painters who are colour-blind, and some painters who are form-blind. Now, Leighton, for instance, is colour-blind, and I—well, I, you know, am form-blind.” The criticism was perhaps unduly severe in both directions, but it announced a pregnant truth and proved that he was not unaware of those particular qualities in which his weakness was apt to betray itself.
This was said during the time when Hallé and I were arranging the collected exhibition of his works at the Grosvenor Gallery, and when he had had a full opportunity of passing in review the gathered achievement of many years’ labour. Those days we passed together superintending the process of hanging were wholly delightful, and served to bring out many interesting characteristics of Tadema’s nature. When the exhibition was first projected Tadema had laid down a rule for our guidance, which he emphatically declared must not be departed from. “The arrangement,” he said, “must be strictly chronological”; for the whole interest of such a collection, as he held, lay in the image it presented of an artist’s gradual development. We offered no objection at the time, though we knew well by previous experience that adherence to so rigid a principle was inconsistent with decorative effect; and we were, therefore, not unduly surprised when Tadema appeared one morning with the revolutionary announcement that the chronological arrangement must go by the board; insisting, with the air of a man who had hitherto unwillingly yielded to our pedantic tradition, that the only fit way to hang an exhibition was to make the pictures look well upon the walls.
The last time I met Alma-Tadema was at a little supper party given by Sir Herbert Tree on the occasion of the first performance of Macbeth. It was impossible for those who had known him in the days of his full vigour not to be conscious even then that his health was failing. From the time of his wife’s death, he had never, indeed, shown the same elasticity of spirit, though with valiant courage he had set himself to take up the broken thread of his life, retaining even to the last that loving and humorous welcome of his friends that had been his unfailing characteristic in happier days. But although admittedly no longer robust, his unflagging interest in the theatre and his friendship for Tree had brought him from home on that evening, and availed to hold him a prisoner for the little impromptu feast that followed the play.
My first experience of Tadema’s work for the theatre was on the occasion of the production of Mr. Ogilvie’s play of Hypatia, when I had persuaded him, at Tree’s invitation, to undertake the designs for the scenery and costumes. This is a kind of work to which many gifted painters cannot readily adapt themselves. But Tadema’s constructive talent, his rare ingenuity in dealing with architectural problems, and, above all, his unrivalled gifts in contriving diversified effects of light and shade, amply fitted him for such a task; and the difficulty which some painters experience of yoking their intended design with the interpretative resources of the scenic artists, proved no difficulty to him. He loved their art with all its infinite devices for the production of illusion, and he knew how to treat them in a spirit of true and loyal comradeship. At the first I had been a little nervous on this score, but, one day, when I asked him how he and the principal scene-painter were progressing, he relieved me of all anxiety upon the matter by the emphatic announcement that he and his associate were in such complete agreement that, as he quaintly phrased it from a peasant formula recalled from the land of his birth, “we are like two hands on one stomach.” As the production neared completion, I remember one evening, we were waiting for Tadema, who had been detained by a council meeting at the Royal Academy. The most important scene was ready set, and, as it seemed to us, with really admirable effect; but when Tadema arrived everything was wrong. He scattered objection and criticism in every direction, sometimes, as I thought, with so little reason that I cast about to discover what could be the source of his discontent. Suddenly I remembered that the hour was late, and that, as he had come straight from Burlington House to keep the appointment, the probability was that he had not dined. I put the question to him, and his answer was immediate, “Of course I have not dined.” “Then,” I said, “let us dine, and leave the men to put these matters right.” The cure acted like magic, for when we returned to the theatre an hour later, Tadema readily found a way by which every defect might be set right.
I was associated with him at a later time with several other productions which he made for the stage, notably the Coriolanus, in the later days of the Lyceum, and, in a lesser degree as far as my work was concerned, in the Julius Caesar presented by Sir Herbert Tree. I think such work was always a pleasure to him, because it brought into play qualities that are not directly involved in the work of a painter. His talent had always a strongly practical side, and it was that which made the construction and perfecting of his own house so keen a pleasure to him. His labours there would, I believe, have remained incomplete even if he had lived for another twenty years. He was always discovering new possibilities that opened the door for fresh improvements, and his knowledge of the details of every craft employed in his service was so exacting and complete that the skilled artificers who laboured for him knew well that they were under the trained eye of a master as well as of an employer.
When I called at his house on the day that brought the news of his death, the quaintly covered way that leads to the front door was girt on either side by a wealth of varied blooms that had been made ready by his gardener to greet his expected return from abroad; and then, a few days later, as I stood beside his coffin that had been reverently set down in the great studio, I found it buried beneath an avalanche of flowers, which his countless friends had sent as a last mark of love and affection. And it was, indeed, a fitting tribute to the dead artist; for Tadema, while he lived, had an absolute passion for flowers. As a painter he would linger with untiring devotion over each separate petal of every separate bloom, and yet with such a sustained sense of mastery in the rendering of their beauty that when the result was complete the infinite mass of perfected detail was found to be firmly bound together by the controlling force of a single effect of light and shade. To a young man who stood beside his easel on a day when he was making a careful study of azaleas that formed an integral part of the design upon which he was engaged, Tadema summed up in a single sentence the spirit in which he constantly laboured: “The people of to-day, they will tell you,” he said, “that all this minute detail—that is not art!” And then, turning again to his picture, he added in his quaint English: “But it has given me so much pleasure to paint him that I cannot help thinking it will give, at least, some one pleasure to look at him, too.” This was the spirit of the older men before the pestilent pursuit of originality came to infect the modest worship of Nature, and it will remain as the dominant quality of all art, whether of to-day or to-morrow, that is destined to outlive the passing fashion of an hour.