A Favourite Custom

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A Favourite Custom: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema Oil Painting - A Favourite Custom

Keywords: Favourite, Custom

Work Overview: A Favourite Custom
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Date: 1909
Style: Romanticism
Genre: genre painting
Media: Oil on wood
Dimensions: 45 x 66.1 cm
Location: Tate Modern, London, UK

It is a surprise to find Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema hanging next to Walter Sickert because he looks like a painter from a different era. His idealised classical nudes made a success of the traditional style and were bought straight away for the nation. A Favourite Custom showed the coldest of the Roman baths, the frigidarium, in accurate archaeological detail, flattering the classical learning of educated Victorians. They are, however, more modern than they look. Hygiene was a newly important social and health concern in cities like London. The beautifully painted surfaces – wet skin, silken hair, diaphanous fabrics, flowers, silver, glass, mosaic and marble – are intensely physical. These luxurious materials appealed to a consumerist bourgeoisie. The greys, mauves and whites suit the cold setting and enhance the eroticism of the warm pink bodies. Alma-Tadema is often accused of painting ‘Victorians in togas,’ but he saw it the opposite way, ‘the old Romans were human flesh and blood like ourselves, moved by the same passions and emotions’.

This scene is set in the baths at Pompeii. In the foreground one woman playfully splashes another bathing in the ‘frigidarium’, a cold bath. The artist based this work on photographs of the ruins of the Stabian baths, revealed by archaeologists in 1824. He has made them more luxurious by adding a marble floor and walls which would more usually have been found in larger imperial baths. This small work attracted enormous success when it was exhibited and bought immediately for the nation.

This scene is set in the Stabian baths at Pompeii. In the foreground one woman playfully splashes another bathing in the 'frigidarium', a cold bath. Others gather in an undressing room beyond. The artist based this work on photographs of the remains of the baths, revealed by archaeologists in 1824. He has made them more luxurious by adding a marble floor and walls which would more usually have been found in larger imperial baths. The Dutch-born artist Alma-Tadema achieved enormous success in Britain with carefully researched scenes like this of daily life in the ancient Roman world.

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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Work Overview