Reverie: Far Away Thoughts

Reverie: Far Away Thoughts (1890) belongs to a category of works in which Alma-Tadema depicted solitary women lost in private contemplation—neither performing a narrative role nor posing for admiration, but caught in the private interior of their own minds. The cardboard support and the Danum Gallery's holding (Doncaster) suggests a smaller-scale, intimate work rather than a major exhibition piece. By 1890 Alma-Tadema had fully explored his range of Roman genre subjects and was producing works with increasing psychological subtlety. The reverie subject—a woman whose gaze suggests she is mentally elsewhere—allowed him to create a psychological space within the archaeology: Roman women could dream, long, and imagine just as Victorian women did. The work's title makes explicit what his compositions often implied: interior life as the true subject beneath the visual archaeology.

Oil or mixed media on cardboard with the careful handling this unconventional support requires. The intimate scale and support material suggest a rapidly executed work or sketch for a larger composition, though Alma-Tadema frequently produced small-scale finished works on cardboard that function as independent aesthetic objects.