The Years At The Spring

Admiring Lawrence Alma-Tadema's paintings was considered almost indecent for a cultural and educated person in the nineteenth century and leading up to the turn of the twentieth century. This prolific Dutch-born painter, who amassed a huge fortune with his brush, was considered a salon painter, the very embodiment of bad taste. Critics and fellow artists poured contempt onto him, while Alma-Tadema, a lover of Cleopatra in leopard skin and who draped Roman women amidst roses and marble, continued to churn out his canvases on historical themes. He enjoyed immense popularity among bourgeois individuals, who, unburdened by an excessive art education, simply appreciated the beauty of a well-painted lady in a respectable, beautiful costume sailing on a beautiful barge amidst beautiful crocodiles. In short, to them, his art was expensive, but worth the money. Decorum, vividness, meticulousness, realism, and theatrical drama were all characteristics of his works.

Alma-Tadema received numerous medals from kings and academies, a knighthood, and after his death in 1912, the British art community breathed a sigh of relief and finally forgot about him. But that was a mistake. Interest in the works of this salon master revived in the second half of the twentieth century. It turned out that his beautiful Egyptians, Jewish women, Roman women, and ancient Germanic women may have had little to do with historical truth, but they recreated the image of the artist's contemporaries—an ideal one, of course, but an exceptionally accurate image. Thus, the ‘merchant of art’ ceased to be merely a minor figure of the Belle Époque, or the period from the last decades of the nineteenth century until the beginning of the First World War.

The painting The Year’s at the Spring, All’s Right with the World is not the best or most famous work by Alma-Tadema. However, it has a wonderful title and embodies the optimism, joy of life, and confidence in the rationality of the world that prevailed at that time. Ten years later, clouds of poisonous gasses would cover the world, and the air would be filled with the cries of dying soldiers. In 1902, everything was already far from being all right with the world, as we now know, and the beautiful paintings, poems, and books of that era could not change the impending nightmare.