Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Lawrence Alma-Tadema was one of the foremost classical painters of his time.
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was born Lourens Alma Tadema on January 8, 1836, in Dronrijp, Friesland, in the Netherlands. The son of a notary, he showed early talent for drawing, and against family expectations entered the Royal Academy of Antwerp at sixteen, studying under Gustaf Wappers and the medievalist Hendrik Leys.
His early canvases drew on Merovingian and ancient Egyptian subjects, but a wedding trip to Italy in 1863 redirected him toward the classical world. The villas of Pompeii, with their frescoes, marble, and bronze, became a lifelong fascination. After settling in London in 1870 following the death of his first wife, he anglicized his name and married the painter Laura Theresa Epps the following year.
Alma-Tadema specialized in scenes of leisured Roman daily life: bathers on marble terraces, banqueters scattering rose petals, lovers on Mediterranean balconies. He researched architectural detail with archaeological rigor, building a reference library of photographs and artifacts. Works such as The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) and The Finding of Moses (1904) sold for record sums in his lifetime.
He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1879, knighted in 1899, and given the Order of Merit in 1905. After his death on June 25, 1912, in Wiesbaden, Germany, his reputation collapsed for decades before reviving from the 1960s; Hollywood epics such as Cleopatra and Gladiator drew openly on his sets.
The name Lawrence comes from the Latin Laurentius, meaning man from Laurentum, an ancient town in Latium whose name was linked in folk etymology to laurus, the laurel. It was carried into Christian tradition by Saint Lawrence the deacon. He bore the name fittingly, a man whose life work returned again and again to the laurel-crowned Roman world.
About the name Lawrence
Gender: Male · Origin: English
A Modern English Form Of Laurence And The Preferred Form In America.