Schets voor de improvisator

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.

1876 · Onderscheiding

Order of the Gold Lion of the House of Nassau

1877 · Onderscheiding

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.