The Coliseum

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

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Keywords: Coliseum

Work Overview

The Colosseum
Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Date: 1896
Style: Romanticism
Genre: genre painting
Media: oil
Dimensions: 112 x 73.6 cm
Location: Private Collection


After his arrival in England, where he was to spend the rest of his life, Alma-Tadema's career was one of continued success. He became one of the most famous and highly paid artists of his time, acknowledged and rewarded. By 1871 he had met and befriended most of the major Pre-Raphaelite painters and it was in part due to their influence that the artist brightened his palette, varied his hues, and lightened his brushwork.


In 1872 Alma-Tadema organised his paintings into an identification system by including an opus number under his signature and assigning his earlier pictures numbers as well. Portrait of my sister, Artje, painted in 1851, is numbered opus I, while two months before his death he completed Preparations in the Coliseum, opus CCCCVIII. Such a system would make it difficult for fakes to be passed off as originals.


On 15 August 1909 Alma-Tadema's wife, Laura, died at the age of fifty-seven. The grief-stricken widower outlived his second wife by less than three years. His last major composition was Preparation in the Coliseum (1912).[24] In the summer of 1912, Alma Tadema was accompanied by his daughter Anna to Kaiserhof Spa, Wiesbaden, Germany where he was to undergo treatment for ulceration of the stomach.[25] He died there on 28 June 1912 at the age of seventy-six. He was buried in a crypt in St Paul's Cathedral in London.