Word: tadema
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...painting. Modernism, the art of the past hundred years, defined itself in opposition to 19th century "bourgeois" painting: the art of the Salon in France, of the Royal Academy in England. Cezanne, Picasso and Matisse were everything that Sir Edwin Landseer, Sir Edward John Poynter and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema were not and could not be. There was no way of judging the academicians by the standards of postimpressionism. You either execrated them and were on the side of history, or enjoyed them and missed the bus. The art the Victorians liked fell victim to the revolutionary mind. After Cezanne...
...Everett Millais's Bubbles, Sir Edwin Landseer's Stag at Bay, George Frederick Watts' Hope, John Collier's The Prodigal Daughter and dozens more. Nothing could have seemed more secure than the fame and popularity of their authors; painters like Lord Leighton or, especially, Alma-Tadema (who, while working on one of his Imperial Roman story-pictures, had fresh roses shipped to him from the south of France weekly for four months to get the petals right) made untaxed fortunes, lived on a scale of grandeur that makes Picasso's seem ascetic, and attracted huge...
...always has. Peter Wilson, the genial and astute entrepreneur whose direction of the auction house of Sotheby's has done so much to create the modern investment fetishism, likes to point out that the prices paid in their day for the works of Victorian painters like Alma-Tadema (when multiplied by 30 to bring them into line with the devalued dollar of the '70s) would make the cost of a Pollock or a Jasper Johns today seem almost reasonable. It is said that the Marquess of Westminster, when asked to send a painting from his collection...