Lawrence Alma-Tadema

In this original and penetrating study, Rosemary Barrow presents an absorbing and often amusing portrait of an exuberant personality who carved out a brilliant career for himself at the heart of London's artistic and cultural élite. But above all she subjects the paintings to a fresh and rigorous scrutiny, revealing that Alma-Tadema was a highly knowledgeable student of antiquity, who made effective use of precise literary and archaeological allusions to play a game of interpretation with his viewers. Time and again the seeming innocence of the scenes he depicts is subverted by a mischievously placed inscription or statue, suggesting to the initiated a darker and usually risqué meaning.