Lourens Alma Tadema was born on 8 January 1836 in the village of Dronryp in the province of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. The surname Tadema is an old Frisian patronymic, meaning ‘son of Tade’, while the names Lourens and Alma came from his godfather. He was the sixth child of Pieter Jiltes Tadema (1797–1840), the village notary, and the third child of Hinke Dirks Brouwer (c. 1800–1863). His father had three sons from a previous marriage. His parents’ first child died young, and the second was Atje (c. 1834–1876), Lourens’ sister, for whom he had great affection.

The Tadema family moved in 1838 to the nearby city of Leeuwarden, where Pieter’s position as a notary would be more lucrative. His father died when Lourens was four, leaving his mother with five children: Lourens, his sister, and three boys from his father’s first marriage. His mother had artistic leanings, and decided that drawing lessons should be incorporated into the children’s education. He received his first art training with a local drawing master hired to teach his older half-brothers.

It was intended that the boy would become a lawyer; but in 1851 at the age of fifteen he suffered a physical and mental breakdown. Diagnosed as consumptive and given only a short time to live, he was allowed to spend his remaining days at his leisure, drawing and painting. Left to his own devices he regained his health and decided to pursue a career as an artist.

In 1852 he entered the Royal Academy of Antwerp in Belgium where he studied early Dutch and Flemish art, under Gustaf Wappers. During Alma-Tadema’s four years as a registered student at the Academy, he won several respectable awards.

Alma-Tadema left Taeye’s studio in November 1858 returning to Leeuwarden before settling in Antwerp, where he began working with the painter Baron Jan August Hendrik Leys, whose studio was one of the most highly regarded in Belgium. Under his guidance Alma-Tadema painted his first major work: The Education of the children of Clovis (1861). This painting created a sensation among critics and artists when it was exhibited that year at the Artistic Congress in Antwerp. It is said to have laid the foundation of his fame and reputation. Alma-Tadema related that although Leys thought the completed painting better than he had expected, he was critical of the treatment of marble, which he compared to cheese.

In 1860 he befriended the Anglo-Dutch Dommersen family of artists in Utrecht In 1862 he made pencil drawings of Mrs. Cornelia Dommershuizen and one of her sons Thomas Hendrik, whose brothers were the painters Pieter Cornelis Dommersen and Cornelis Christiaan Dommersen.

Merovingian themes were the painter’s favourite subject up to the mid-1860s. It is perhaps in this series that we find the artist moved by the deepest feeling and the strongest spirit of romance. However Merovingian subjects did not have a wide international appeal, so he switched to themes of life in ancient Egypt that were more popular. On these scenes of Frankish and Egyptian life Alma-Tadema spent great energy and much research. In 1862 Alma-Tadema left Leys’s studio and started his own career, establishing himself as a significant classical-subject European artist.

1863 was to alter the course of Alma-Tadema’s personal and professional life: on 3 January his invalid mother died, and on 24 September he was married, in Antwerp City Hall, to Marie-Pauline Gressin-Dumoulin de Boisgirard, the daughter of Eugène Gressin-Dumoulin, a French journalist living near Brussels. Nothing is known of their meeting and little of Pauline herself, as Alma-Tadema never spoke about her after her death in 1869. Her image appears in a number of oils, though he painted her portrait only three times, the most notable appearing in My studio (1867). The couple had three children. Their eldest and only son lived only a few months dying of smallpox. Their two daughters, Laurence (1864–1940) and Anna (1867–1943), both had artistic leanings: the former in literature, the latter in art. Neither would marry.

During the summer of 1864, Tadema met Ernest Gambart, the most influential print publisher and art dealer of the period. Gambart was highly impressed with the work of Tadema, who was then painting Egyptian chess players (1865). The dealer, recognising at once the unusual gifts of the young painter, gave him an order for twenty-four pictures and arranged for three of Tadema’s paintings to be shown in London. In 1865, Tadema relocated to Brussels where he was named a knight of the Order of Leopold.

On 28 May 1869, after years of ill health, Pauline died at Schaerbeek, in Belgium, at the age of thirty-two, of smallpox. Her death left Tadema disconsolate and depressed. He ceased painting for nearly four months. His sister Artje, who lived with the family, helped with the two daughters then aged five and two. Artje took over the role of housekeeper and remained with the family until 1873 when she married.

During the summer Tadema himself began to suffer from a medical problem which doctors in Brussels were frustratingly unable to diagnose. Gambart eventually advised him to go to England for another medical opinion. Soon after his arrival in London in December 1869, Alma-Tadema was invited to the home of the painter Ford Madox Brown. There he met Laura Theresa Epps, who was seventeen years old, and fell in love with her at first sight.

The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 compelled Alma-Tadema to leave the continent and move to London. His infatuation with Laura Epps played a great part in his relocation to England and Gambart felt that the move would be advantageous to the artist’s career. In stating his reasons for the move, Tadema simply said “I lost my first wife, a French lady with whom I married in 1863, in 1869. Having always had a great predilection for London, the only place where, up till then my work had met with buyers, I decided to leave the continent and go to settle in England, where I have found a true home.”

With his small daughters and sister Atje, Alma-Tadema arrived in London at the beginning of September 1870. The painter wasted no time in contacting Laura, and it was arranged that he would give her painting lessons. During one of these, he proposed marriage. As he was then thirty-four and Laura was now only eighteen, her father was initially opposed to the idea. Dr Epps finally agreed on the condition that they should wait until they knew each other better. They married in July 1871. Laura, under her married name, also won a high reputation as an artist, and appears in numerous of Alma-Tadema’s canvases after their marriage (The Women of Amphissa (1887) being a notable example). This second marriage was enduring and happy, though childless, and Laura became stepmother to Anna and Laurence. Anna became a painter and Laurence became a novelist.

In 1872 Alma-Tadema organised his paintings into an identification system by including an opus number under his signature and assigning his earlier pictures numbers as well. Portrait of my sister, Artje, painted in 1851, is numbered opus I, while two months before his death he completed Preparations in the Coliseum, opus CCCCVIII. Such a system would make it difficult for fakes to be passed off as originals.

In 1873 Queen Victoria in Council by letters patent made Alma-Tadema and his wife what are now the last British Denizens (the legal process has theoretically not yet been abolished in the United Kingdom), with some limited special rights otherwise only accorded to and enjoyed by British subjects (what would now be called British citizens). The previous year he and his wife made a journey on the Continent that lasted five and a half months and took them through Brussels, Germany, and Italy. In Italy they were able to take in the ancient ruins again; this time he purchased several photographs, mostly of the ruins, which began his immense collection of folios with archival material sufficient for the documentation used in the completion of future paintings. In January 1876, he rented a studio in Rome. The family returned to London in April, visiting the Parisian Salon on their way back. In London he regularly met with fellow-artist Emil Fuchs.

Alma-Tadema was considered one of the most popular Victorian painters. He was among the most financially successful painters of the Victorian era, though never matching Edwin Henry Landseer. For over sixty years he gave his audience exactly what they wanted: distinctive, elaborate paintings of beautiful people in classical settings. His incredibly detailed reconstructions of ancient Rome, with languid men and women posed against white marble in dazzling sunlight provided his audience with a glimpse of a world of the kind they might one day construct for themselves at least in attitude if not in detail. As with other painters, the reproduction rights for prints were often worth more than the canvas, and a painting with its rights still attached may have been sold to Gambart for £10,000 in 1874; without rights it was sold again in 1903, when Alma-Tadema’s prices were actually higher, for £2,625. Typical prices were between £2,000 and £3,000 in the 1880s, but at least three works sold for between £5,250 and £6,060 in the 1900s. Prices held well until the general collapse of Victorian prices in the early 1920s, when they fell to the hundreds, where they remained until the 1960s; by 1969 £4,600 had been reached again (the huge effect of inflation must of course be remembered for all these figures).

On 19 June 1879, Alma-Tadema was made a full Academician, his most personally important award. Three years later a major retrospective of his entire oeuvre was organised at the Grosvenor Gallery in London, including 185 of his pictures.

In 1883 he returned to Rome and, most notably, Pompeii, where further excavations had taken place since his last visit. He spent a significant amount of time studying the site, going there daily. These excursions gave him an ample source of subject matter as he began to further his knowledge of daily Roman life. At times, however, he integrated so many objects into his paintings that some said they resembled museum catalogues.

Alma-Tadema’s output decreased with time, partly on account of health, but also because of his obsession with decorating his new home, to which he moved in 1883. Nevertheless, he continued to exhibit throughout the 1880s and into the next decade, receiving a plentiful amount of accolades along the way, including the medal of Honour at the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889, election to an honorary member of the Oxford University Dramatic Society in 1890, the Great Gold Medal at the International Exposition in Brussels of 1897. In 1899 he was Knighted in England, only the eighth artist from the Continent to receive the honour. Not only did he assist with the organisation of the British section at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, he also exhibited two works that earned him the Grand Prix Diploma. He also assisted with the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 where he was well represented and received.

During this time, Alma-Tadema was very active with theatre design and production, designing many costumes. He also spread his artistic boundaries and began to design furniture, often modelled after Pompeian or Egyptian motifs, illustrations, textiles, and frame making. In late 1902 he visited Egypt. His diverse interests highlight his talents. Each of these exploits were used in his paintings, as he often incorporated some of his designed furniture into the composition, and must have used many of his own designs for the clothing of his female subjects. Through his last period of creativity Alma-Tadema continued to produce paintings, which repeat the successful formula of women in marble terraces overlooking the sea such as in Silver Favourites (1903). Between 1906 and his death six years later, Alma-Tadema painted less but still produced ambitious paintings like The Finding of Moses (1904).

On 15 August 1909 Alma-Tadema’s wife, Laura, died at the age of fifty-seven. The grief-stricken widower outlived his second wife by less than three years. His last major composition was Preparation in the Coliseum (1912). In the summer of 1912, Alma-Tadema was accompanied by his daughter Anna to Kaiserhof Spa, Wiesbaden, Germany where he was to undergo treatment for ulceration of the stomach. He died there on 28 June 1912 at the age of seventy-six. He was buried in a crypt in St Paul’s Cathedral in London.

In 1960, the Newman Gallery firstly tried to sell, then give away (without success) one of his most celebrated works, The Finding of Moses (1904). The initial purchaser had paid £5,250 for it on its completion, and subsequent sales were for £861 in 1935, £265 in 1942, and it was “bought in” at £252 in 1960 (having failed to meet its reserve), but when the same picture was auctioned at Christies in New York in May 1995, it sold for £1.75 million. On 4 November 2010 it was sold for $35,922,500 to an undisclosed bidder at Sotheby’s New York, a new record both for an Alma-Tadema work and for a Victorian painting. On 5 May 2011 his The Meeting of Antony and Cleopatra: 41 BC was sold at the same auction house for $29.2 million.

In 1962, New York art dealer Robert Isaacson mounted the first show of Alma-Tadema’s work in fifty years; by the late 1960s, the revival of interest in Victorian painting gained impetus, and a number of well-attended exhibitions were held. Allen Funt, the creator and host of the American version of the television show Candid Camera, was a collector of Alma-Tadema paintings at a time when the artist’s reputation in the 20th century was at its nadir; in a relatively few years he bought 35 works, about ten percent of Alma-Tadema’s output. After Funt was robbed by his accountant (who subsequently committed suicide), he was forced to sell his collection at Sotheby’s in London in November 1973. From this sale, the interest in Alma-Tadema was re-awakened.

A blue plaque unveiled in 1975 commemorates Alma-Tadema at 44 Grove End Road, St John’s Wood, his home from 1886 until his death in 1912.

Alma-Tadema’s meticulous archaeological research, including research into Roman architecture (which was so thorough that every building featured in his canvases could have been built using Roman tools and methods) led to his paintings being used as source material by Hollywood directors in their vision of the ancient world for films such as D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance (1916), Ben Hur (1926), Cleopatra (1934), and most notably of all, Cecil B. DeMille’s epic remake of The Ten Commandments (1956). Indeed, Jesse Lasky Jr., the co-writer on The Ten Commandments, described how the director would customarily spread out prints of Alma-Tadema paintings to indicate to his set designers the look he wanted to achieve. The designers of the Oscar-winning Roman epic Gladiator used the paintings of Alma-Tadema as a central source of inspiration. Alma-Tadema’s paintings were also the inspiration for the design of the interior of Cair Paravel castle in the 2005 film The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Alma-Tadema’s The Tepidarium (1881) is included in the 2006 book 1001 Paintings You Must See Before You Die. Julian Treuherz, Keeper of Art Galleries at National Museums Liverpool, describes it as an “exquisitely painted picture…” which “carries a strong erotic charge, rare for a Victorian painting of the nude”.