Portrait of Alma Tadema

John Collier painted this portrait of Lawrence Alma-Tadema in 1884, when the Dutch-born, naturalised British painter was at the height of his fame and social prestige. Alma-Tadema was among the most celebrated and commercially successful artists in Victorian England, famed for his archaeologically precise recreations of ancient Greek and Roman domestic life rendered in gleaming, sensuous detail. By 1884 Collier was himself a well-established society portraitist and was in an unusually intimate position to paint Alma-Tadema: Collier had married Marian Huxley, daughter of the scientist T.H. Huxley, in 1879, and after her death in 1887 he would marry her sister Ethel. Alma-Tadema was among the prominent figures in the artistic and scientific intelligentsia whose social circles overlapped. Collier trained partly under Alma-Tadema himself, giving the portrait an additional layer of significance as a record of teacher and student, or master and disciple. The sitter's confident, prosperous bearing — Alma-Tadema was by this time knighted and enormously wealthy — would have required a portraitist of Collier's social fluency to render sympathetically while maintaining honest observation. The portrait is now in the Sarjeant Gallery in Whanganui, New Zealand, an indication of how widely Victorian academic painting dispersed to colonial collections.

Oil on canvas in Collier's characteristically assured academic manner, with careful attention to the textures of clothing, the fall of light on the face, and the furnishings that signal the sitter's status. Paint is applied smoothly, with controlled glazing in the shadows and more impasted lights on the face and collar. The composition follows established portrait conventions while retaining psychological presence.