Lourens Alma TademaDutch, 1836–1912Schets voor de improvisator
Can I see it?
Unknown
Where is “Schets voor de improvisator” now? Collection: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Unknown.
Amsterdam, Netherlands
The owner is known; whether it is on view today is not.
- Source
- The museum
About the work
Museum text in Dutch
Een man staat in een veld, met een lier op een arm, kijkend naar boven. Op de achtergrond drie zittende figuren.
Rijksmuseum
Details
- Accession number
- RP-P-1879-A-3268
What it shows
In the catalog
Sources
- Rijksmuseum
- Image: Rijksmuseum — public domain
In the life of Lourens Alma Tadema
The whole life1875–1876
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.
1876 · Award
Order of the Gold Lion of the House of Nassau
1877 · Award
3rd Class Order of the Crown
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.
