In the Tepidarium

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In the Tepidarium: Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

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Art Type: Oil Painting
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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema Oil Painting - In the Tepidarium

Keywords: Tepidarium

Work Overview: The Tepidarium
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Date: 1881
Style: Romanticism
Genre: nude painting (nu)
Oil on panel
24 x 33cm

Alma-Tadema was born in Holland but settled in London, where he achieved great success with his scenes of daily life in ancient times.

The tepidarium was the warm Roman bath. This painting shows a girl holding an ostrich feather and a strigil used for scraping the skin after soaping and oiling it. Alma-Tadema generally contrasted archaeologically accurate detail with aggressively modern figures and attitudes. He was also the most gifted exponent among Victorian painters in rendering exactly textures, surfaces and colours.

This combination of learning and realism proved very disconcerting when applied to the nude. It is surprising that A and F Pears, who owned this work before Leverhulme purchased it in 1916, could ever have considered using it in a soap advertisement, however appropriate for the purpose it may be.

The tepidarium was the warm (tepidus) bathroom of the Roman baths heated by a hypocaust or underfloor heating system. The specialty of a tepidarium is the pleasant feeling of constant radiant heat which directly affects the human body from the walls and floor.

There is an interesting example at Pompeii; this was covered with a semicircular barrel vault, decorated with reliefs in stucco, and round the room a series of square recesses or niches divided from one another by Telamones. The tepidarium in the Roman thermae was the great central hall round which all the other halls were grouped, and which gave the key to the plans of the thermae. It was probably the hall where the bathers first assembled prior to passing through the various hot baths (Caldaria) or taking the cold bath (Frigidarium). The tepidarium was decorated with the richest marbles and mosaics: it received its light through clerestory windows, on the sides, the front and the rear, and would seem to have been the hall in which the finest treasures of art were placed; thus in the thermae of Caracalla, the Farnese Hercules, and the Toro Farnese, the two gladiators, the sarcophagi of green basalt now in the Vatican, and numerous other treasures, were found during the excavations by Paul III in 1546, and transported to the Vatican and the museum at Naples.

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Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Work Overview