Roundtable

Lawrence Alma-Tadema: A Victorian Painter-Designer Celebrated Anew

Thursday, March 23
7:00 PM

This year the Dutch-born, London-based artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) is the subject of two innovative exhibitions being presented at museums on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The curators who organized them will share their insights on why this remarkable master merits such attention.
   Already on tour in the Netherlands, Austria, and England, the exhibition Lawrence Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity explores his fascination with the representation of domestic life in antiquity and how this interest was expressed through the two extraordinary studio houses he created in London with his wife Laura and his two daughters. Exhibition co-curator Peter Trippi (Editor-in-Chief of Fine Art Connoisseur and former director of New York’s Dahesh Museum of Art) will consider how Alma-Tadema’s paintings fixed ideas in the popular imagination of what life in the ancient past ‘looked like.’
   This summer (June 4 – September 4), the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, will mount the exhibition Orchestrating Elegance: Alma-Tadema and Design, which focuses on the “Greco-Pompeian” music room Alma-Tadema designed for the Madison Avenue mansion of Gilded Age magnate Henry Marquand.  For the first time since 1903, this exhibition will bring together the expertly crafted furniture suite as well as paintings, Greek terracottas, and reproduction sculptures of ancient bronzes that were displayed there. On hand to describe it are co-curators Kathleen Morris, the Clark's Marx Director of Collections and Exhibitions and Curator of Decorative Arts, and Clark Curatorial Research Associate Alexis Goodin.