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Lot Essay
The artist was born Laura Theresa Epps; her father, George Napoleon Epps, was a well-known homeopathic doctor, and her sister Ellen, who also became a painter, married Edmund Gosse. Laura met the Dutch artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema at a party given by the Madox Browns in Fitzroy Square in the winter of 1869-70. She was seventeen, he thirty-three. Though well-known on the continent, he was already contemplating settling in England, where his work was popular, and falling in love with Laura at first sight finally determined him to make the move. On his arrival she became his pupil, and they married eighteen months later.
Laura wisely avoided the elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world that were her husband's speciality, but the influence of Dutch seventeenth-century painting, latent in his meticulous technique, was overt in her own homely genre scenes, which are usually vaguely seventeenth-century in detail and feeling. She also cultivated this element in the lavish and highly eclectic interiors which the couple created first at Townshend House, Regent's Park, where they settled on their marriage, and then at 17 Grove End Road, St John's Wood, to which they moved in 1886. The house had belonged to James Tissot during his years in London, but he had left it precipitately to return to Paris on the death of his mistress, Kathleen Newton, in 1882. 'In the details of domestic life, Dutch habits, Dutch furniture, and Dutch dress of the gentler and more courtly sort in the seventeenth century', wrote Alice Meynell, 'Mrs Alma-Tadema has found unconventional, honest and ... homely grace ... The artist has surrounded herself by relics and remains of the time and the country she loves, ... and thus her pictures seem to be produced within a genuine little Holland, in a genuine seventeenth century, without the blunders of ordinary historical research' (Art Journal, 1883, p. 345). Laura exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1873. She also supported the Grosvenor and New Galleries, the Paris Salon and the Berlin Academy, and was one of only two English women artists to contribute to the International Exhibition in Paris in 1878.
This recently rediscovered picture, still in its original tabernacle frame, is among the artist's most charming studies of childhood, one of her favourite themes. Dressed in seventeenth-century Dutch costume, the little girl sits at a window, looking out on the garden at 17 Grove End Road. The colonnade erected by Tissot and introduced into several of his pictures can be seen in the distance. The child's wistful expression could indicate that she has been forbidden to go out, but there is no reason to assume that this is the case and it is not implied by the title. Superficially, we are reminded of Sophie Anderson's famous (and much earlier) picture No Walk Today (private collection), but whereas the little girl there is prevented from going out by heavy rain, Laura Alma-Tadema's child has every inducement to leave her window-sill and play in the sunlit garden.
The child's reflection in the glass is a daring pictorial conceit and one that has no obvious parallel in Victorian painting. The only comparison that leaps to mind is the optical confusion deliberately created by Holman Hunt in his portrait of his son seen through a plate-glass window, Master Hilary - The Tracer. Exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1887, the picture sold in these Rooms on 3 June 1994, lot 163.
The picture is undated, but was assigned to 1881 when it was shown at the Guildhall in 1900 and to 1893 when it appeared in the artist's memorial exhibition in 1910. Both dates would appear to be too early. Like her husband, Laura Alma-Tadema gave her pictures opus numbers, and in recent years Christie's have sold numbers XLIX (49) and LXI (61), which were exhibited respectively in 1881 and 1896. Our picture, which is numbered LXXXI (81), is presumably later, although it cannot be later than 1900, the year of the Guildhall exhibition.
It has been suggested that the model for the picture was Anna Alma-Tadema, Alma-Tadema's daughter by his first wife, who also became an artist, but since Anna was born in 1867, this cannot be the case.
In her article on Lady Alma-Tadema, published in the Studio a year after the artist died, Marion Hepworth Dixon described the picture as 'analogous' to another work, The New Book, which the article illustrated. This 'simple study in light and atmosphere', showing a 'lady bending over her tome...silhouetted against an open casement', is obviously indebted to Vermeer, an artist who did not yet command the universal reputation as a genius that he enjoys today. Our picture, with its extreme luminosity and strong accents of lemon yellow and blue, seems to betray the same influence.
We are grateful to Professor Vern G. Swanson, Director of the Springville Museum of Art, Utah, for his help in preparing this entry. The picture will be illustrated in his forthcoming book on Laura and Anna Alma-Tadema.
Laura wisely avoided the elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world that were her husband's speciality, but the influence of Dutch seventeenth-century painting, latent in his meticulous technique, was overt in her own homely genre scenes, which are usually vaguely seventeenth-century in detail and feeling. She also cultivated this element in the lavish and highly eclectic interiors which the couple created first at Townshend House, Regent's Park, where they settled on their marriage, and then at 17 Grove End Road, St John's Wood, to which they moved in 1886. The house had belonged to James Tissot during his years in London, but he had left it precipitately to return to Paris on the death of his mistress, Kathleen Newton, in 1882. 'In the details of domestic life, Dutch habits, Dutch furniture, and Dutch dress of the gentler and more courtly sort in the seventeenth century', wrote Alice Meynell, 'Mrs Alma-Tadema has found unconventional, honest and ... homely grace ... The artist has surrounded herself by relics and remains of the time and the country she loves, ... and thus her pictures seem to be produced within a genuine little Holland, in a genuine seventeenth century, without the blunders of ordinary historical research' (Art Journal, 1883, p. 345). Laura exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1873. She also supported the Grosvenor and New Galleries, the Paris Salon and the Berlin Academy, and was one of only two English women artists to contribute to the International Exhibition in Paris in 1878.
This recently rediscovered picture, still in its original tabernacle frame, is among the artist's most charming studies of childhood, one of her favourite themes. Dressed in seventeenth-century Dutch costume, the little girl sits at a window, looking out on the garden at 17 Grove End Road. The colonnade erected by Tissot and introduced into several of his pictures can be seen in the distance. The child's wistful expression could indicate that she has been forbidden to go out, but there is no reason to assume that this is the case and it is not implied by the title. Superficially, we are reminded of Sophie Anderson's famous (and much earlier) picture No Walk Today (private collection), but whereas the little girl there is prevented from going out by heavy rain, Laura Alma-Tadema's child has every inducement to leave her window-sill and play in the sunlit garden.
The child's reflection in the glass is a daring pictorial conceit and one that has no obvious parallel in Victorian painting. The only comparison that leaps to mind is the optical confusion deliberately created by Holman Hunt in his portrait of his son seen through a plate-glass window, Master Hilary - The Tracer. Exhibited at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1887, the picture sold in these Rooms on 3 June 1994, lot 163.
The picture is undated, but was assigned to 1881 when it was shown at the Guildhall in 1900 and to 1893 when it appeared in the artist's memorial exhibition in 1910. Both dates would appear to be too early. Like her husband, Laura Alma-Tadema gave her pictures opus numbers, and in recent years Christie's have sold numbers XLIX (49) and LXI (61), which were exhibited respectively in 1881 and 1896. Our picture, which is numbered LXXXI (81), is presumably later, although it cannot be later than 1900, the year of the Guildhall exhibition.
It has been suggested that the model for the picture was Anna Alma-Tadema, Alma-Tadema's daughter by his first wife, who also became an artist, but since Anna was born in 1867, this cannot be the case.
In her article on Lady Alma-Tadema, published in the Studio a year after the artist died, Marion Hepworth Dixon described the picture as 'analogous' to another work, The New Book, which the article illustrated. This 'simple study in light and atmosphere', showing a 'lady bending over her tome...silhouetted against an open casement', is obviously indebted to Vermeer, an artist who did not yet command the universal reputation as a genius that he enjoys today. Our picture, with its extreme luminosity and strong accents of lemon yellow and blue, seems to betray the same influence.
We are grateful to Professor Vern G. Swanson, Director of the Springville Museum of Art, Utah, for his help in preparing this entry. The picture will be illustrated in his forthcoming book on Laura and Anna Alma-Tadema.