Jonge vrouw met luit

1874

A gunpowder barge explosion wrecks the house by the canal

A barge loaded with gunpowder exploded on the Regent's Canal and destroyed Alma-Tadema's London house; the owners were visiting the poet William Bell Scott in Scotland, whose collection the artist was to illustrate. His daughters, who were at home, were thrown from the windows together with their beds but not seriously hurt, and not one painting was damaged, although the studio could no longer be used.

1874

Three canvases at the Royal Academy: “Joseph”

In 1874 he showed three canvases at the Royal Academy, among them “Joseph, Overseer of Pharaoh's Granaries” — an Egyptian and at the same time biblical subject that summed up the methods of his 1860s; the scene with geese was taken from the tomb of Nebamun.

1875–1876

A winter in Rome: a rented studio and Siemiradzki

The destruction forced him to rent a studio, and he spent the winter of 1875 in Rome and worked there again from January to April 1876; in Rome he met Henryk Siemiradzki and viewed his new painting “The Torches of Christianity (Nero's Torches)”. During these months of working as a graphic artist and watercolourist his own method took shape: a first sketch and studies made directly on the same canvas on which the final version was then painted.

1876

“An Audience at Agrippa's” at the Paris Salon

On the way back from Rome the couple took part in the Paris Salon of 1876, where they showed “An Audience at Agrippa's” — a picture unusually sharp for an artist who rarely noticed the dark sides of antiquity: bowing slaves with cropped hair and petitioners in the foreground. It was so popular that in 1879 Sir William Armstrong commissioned a repetition, but Alma-Tadema painted a different canvas, “After the Audience”, which the patron did not like.

1878

The 1878 World's Fair: silver instead of gold, and an order

He sent ten paintings to the British section of the Paris World's Fair but received only a silver medal: the gold went to the Bavarian H. Herkomer, as Alma-Tadema irritably wrote to Gambart. The offence was made up for by the rank of officer of the Legion of Honour, awarded at the end of the exhibition.

19 June 1879

Elected a full Royal Academician

On 19 June 1879 Alma-Tadema became a full member of the Royal Academy of Arts — the most significant of his achievements; three years earlier he had been admitted to the Academy as an associate.