The artist's wife

The Artist's Wife (1871) is a portrait of Marie Pauline Gressin-Dumoulin de Boisgirard, Alma-Tadema's first wife, who died in 1869—just before this work's date—of complications from smallpox. If dated 1871, this portrait may be retrospective, based on earlier drawings or his visual memory, making it a memorial image rather than a live sitting. Alternatively, it may record his second wife Laura, whom he married in 1871. The Mesdag Collection in The Hague holds this panel; Hendrik Willem Mesdag was a Dutch marine painter and collector who assembled an important collection of nineteenth-century painting. Portraiture occupied a secondary but consistent role in Alma-Tadema's practice alongside his historical genre scenes, and his approach to it brought the same material sensitivity and atmospheric light control that distinguished his subject paintings.

Oil on panel with the intimate scale and smooth surface characteristic of Alma-Tadema's small-format portraits. His portraiture typically employs a three-quarter view within a simply organized spatial setting, with light falling to reveal the sitter's facial character through careful tonal modeling.