A Favourite Custom Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

A Favourite Custom
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1909-01-01
From the collection of
Tate Britain
This scene is set in the Stabian baths at Pompeii. In the foreground one woman playfully splashes another bathing in the 'frigidarium', a cold bath. Others gather in an undressing room beyond. The artist based this work on photographs of the remains of the baths, revealed by archaeologists in 1824. He has made them more luxurious by adding a marble floor and walls which would more usually have been found in larger imperial baths. The Dutch-born artist Alma-Tadema achieved enormous success in Britain with carefully researched scenes like this of daily life in the ancient Roman world.
Details
Title: A Favourite Custom
Creator: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Date: 1909-01-01
Provenance: Presented by the Trustees of the Chantrey Bequest 1909
Physical Dimensions: 660 x 451 mm
Original Title: A Favourite Custom
Type: Painting
Rights: Tate
Medium: Oil on wood

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Jan 8, 1836 - Jun 25, 1912

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, OM, RA was a Frisian painter of special British denizenship.
Born in Dronrijp, the Netherlands, and trained at the Royal Academy of Antwerp, Belgium, he settled in England in 1870 and spent the rest of his life there. A classical-subject painter, he became famous for his depictions of the luxury and decadence of the Roman Empire, with languorous figures set in fabulous marbled interiors or against a backdrop of dazzling blue Mediterranean Sea and sky.
Though admired during his lifetime for his draftsmanship and depictions of Classical antiquity, his work fell into disrepute after his death, and only since the 1960s has it been re-evaluated for its importance within nineteenth-century English art.
http://hisour.com/art-medium/paintings/a-favourite-custom-sir-lawrence-alma-tadema/