The vintage festival Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1871

The vintage festival
Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1871
From the collection of
National Gallery of Victoria
Described in the Windsor Magazine in 1896 as ‘a master of white marble and blue skies’, Lawrence Alma- Tadema was renowned for the historical accuracy of his paintings. The vintage festival is set in the villa of Marcus Holconius Rufus, a prominent citizen of Pompeii at the time of that city’s destruction (79 CE). This work is a classic example of the astonishingly vivid recreations of daily life in the ancient Roman and Greek worlds that brought the Dutch-born Alma-Tadema – who had migrated to England from Belgium in 1870 – both critical acclaim and financial security.

A scholar of ancient history, Alma-Tadema has filled this scene of Bacchic revelry – celebrating the fruits of the annual grape harvest – with dozens of lovingly recreated objects from the first century CE, which he had researched with an archaeological precision (he later bequeathed his five-thousand-volume research library to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London). As a critic for the Art Journal wrote of The vintage festival in 1883:

In this elaborate composition the artist has carried archaeological realism to a high degree: witness the straps and bandages which support the flutes at the mouths of the flute-players. The richness and the quantity of the work in this picture are surprising; nevertheless it is full of space, neither the numbers of figures nor the profusion of architectural and other exquisite detail producing any crowd of forms or infelicity of lines. The colour is a splendid combination of richness and radiance, all the loveliness of tint possible to flowers, gold, and marble, silk and rich ivy-leaves, being brought together in a chord of colour that has not the quarter of a semitone astray. (Art Journal, March 1883, p.67)

Alma-Tadema painted two versions of this composition simultaneously: a larger painting (now at the Kunsthalle Hamburg), which was first exhibited at the gallery of the London dealer Ernest Gambart in 1871; and the slightly smaller version (this painting), which was sent to the printer Auguste Blanchard in Paris, to be used as the basis for an engraving. Blanchard’s engraving, published in 1874, served to further familiarize Victorian audiences with Alma-Tadema’s Dionysian depiction of Roman splendour.

Text by Dr Ted Gott from 19th century painting and sculpture in the international collections of the National Gallery of Victoria, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, 2003, p. 69.
Details
Title: The vintage festival
Creator: Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Date Created: 1871
Provenance: Commissioned by Ernest Gambart (1814–1902) (dealer-collector), London and Spa, Belgium, 1871–86 (his private collection); from whom purchased by Thomas Agnew and Sons (dealer), London, 15 July 1886; purchased from Agnew and Sons, by Alfred Taddy Thompson and Sir James McCulloch, for the National Gallery of Victoria, 1888.
Physical Dimensions: w1190 x h510 cm (Unframed)
Type: Paintings
Rights: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne Purchased, 1888, © National Gallery of Victoria
External Link: National Gallery of Victoria http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/col/work/3699
Medium: oil on wood panel

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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/the-vintage-festival-lawrence-alma-tadema-1871/