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Lot Essay
This watercolour is one of a series of works by Alma-Tadema which celebrate romantic love and courtship in the ancient world. The composition is entirely typical of his work, with a young woman sitting upright on a marble bench, listening to the entreaties of the young man who reclines beside her. By 1876, Alma-Tadema was famous for his painting of white marble, and he demonstrates his skill at representing the stone here, in what is the brightest of the courtship pictures. He uses the transparency of watercolour to suggest the colours of the sun-soaked marble, giving it an almost luminescent appearance.
The courtship composition first appeared in Pleading, an 1876 oil now in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London. That title remained strongly associated with this drawing, whose current title is the original from Alma-Tadema’s work list. The composition was an immediate success with the writers as well as the painters of Alma-Tadema's circle, who had a keen interest in debates of the period about whether the ancient Greeks and Romans had possessed a concept of romantic love. Against the arguments of some classical scholars, that romantic love was a modern invention, the distinguished German Egyptologist Georg Ebers maintained that romance was a universal human emotion, and dramatized this opinion in a sequence of historical novels. He was immediately inspired by the Pleading composition, which he saw in a version exhibited at Munich in 1879 (Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico City), to write a novella that narrated the love story of the two figures under the title Eine Frage (1880, soon translated into English as A Question). Subsequently Tadema borrowed the names of Ebers' fictional characters, Xanthe and Phaon, to make another watercolour version (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). Thus the two friends, Ebers and Tadema, influenced one another in turn.
Alma-Tadema’s patrons found this composition so appealingly romantic that he executed several versions of it. The present drawing, dating from 1878, is the first of three known examples in watercolour, with the other two dating to 1883, Op. CCLVIII (British Museum, London) and Op. CCLIX (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). In each version of the composition, Alma-Tadema retained the fundamental relationship between the two figures – the female contemplative, the male beseeching and submissive, gazing up at her. This sheet is wider than the others, giving an almost panoramic view over the edge of the bench to the expansive sea beyond, with its miniature sailing boats just visible.
The courtship composition first appeared in Pleading, an 1876 oil now in the Guildhall Art Gallery, London. That title remained strongly associated with this drawing, whose current title is the original from Alma-Tadema’s work list. The composition was an immediate success with the writers as well as the painters of Alma-Tadema's circle, who had a keen interest in debates of the period about whether the ancient Greeks and Romans had possessed a concept of romantic love. Against the arguments of some classical scholars, that romantic love was a modern invention, the distinguished German Egyptologist Georg Ebers maintained that romance was a universal human emotion, and dramatized this opinion in a sequence of historical novels. He was immediately inspired by the Pleading composition, which he saw in a version exhibited at Munich in 1879 (Colección Pérez Simón, Mexico City), to write a novella that narrated the love story of the two figures under the title Eine Frage (1880, soon translated into English as A Question). Subsequently Tadema borrowed the names of Ebers' fictional characters, Xanthe and Phaon, to make another watercolour version (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). Thus the two friends, Ebers and Tadema, influenced one another in turn.
Alma-Tadema’s patrons found this composition so appealingly romantic that he executed several versions of it. The present drawing, dating from 1878, is the first of three known examples in watercolour, with the other two dating to 1883, Op. CCLVIII (British Museum, London) and Op. CCLIX (Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). In each version of the composition, Alma-Tadema retained the fundamental relationship between the two figures – the female contemplative, the male beseeching and submissive, gazing up at her. This sheet is wider than the others, giving an almost panoramic view over the edge of the bench to the expansive sea beyond, with its miniature sailing boats just visible.