Original Article: http://dartreview.com/archives/2008/08/11/gallery_chronicles_almatadema_at_the_hood.php
Monday, August 11, 2008
Editor’s Note: “Alma-Tadema and Antiquity: Imaging Classical Sculpture in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” will be on display at the Hood Museum of Art until September 28.
Although it is tucked away in the small wing of the second floor known as the Harrington Gallery, the Hood Museum of Art’s most recent exhibit, “Alma-Tadema and Antiquity: Imaging Classical Sculpture in Late-Nineteenth-Century Britain,” is not to be missed. The entire exhibit is centered upon the treasure of the Hood’s nineteenth-century European painting collection, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s 1874 masterpiece, “The Sculpture Gallery.”
Of the various moods, movements and genres that divide up art history textbooks, the genre of “history painting” is not given a considerable number of pages. While said textbooks often celebrate the rebellious originality of the Impressionists of the period, the Neoclassical painters of the late nineteenth-century are often noted merely for their technical virtuosity. While Alma-Tadema had certainly mastered the skill of realistic—albeit idealized—representation and complex composition extolled by the Academy (then the supreme dictator of “who’s who” in the Western art world), the exhibit also pays homage to the painter’s immense creativity and painstaking attention to object detail.
On display is a painted study and a composite radiograph showing the changes to the final painting’s composition as it was developed, evidence of the amount of planning that went into the execution of the final work. Information about the objects represented in the painting occupies the rest of the exhibition space. Alma-Tadema made hundreds of sketches and photographs of ancient works of art during his visits to Pompeii and Naples in the 1860s; several of the sculptural objects shown in his photographs and sketches, which appear in the final painting, are on display. These include the original marble table supports represented in the foreground and the bronze candelabrum represented in the background, originally excavated from Pompeii and imported from Italy for the exhibit. Even the replica of the gold snake bangle Alma-Tadema and his wife commissioned in 1874 from Joseph and Alfred Wyon in England, seen on the central female figure’s arm, was secured by an art dealer especially for the Hood. Photographs of Alma-Tadema in Pompeii and illustrated archeological literature on Pompeii from the Dartmouth College Library nicely round out the rest of the gallery space.
While a contemporary audience can certainly admire Alma-Tadema’s skills in painting, composition, and object representation in this single artwork, what makes the painting resonate 134 years later? In a lecture celebrating the opening of the exhibit last month, T. Barton Thurber, the museum’s Curator of European Art, made two suggestions. First, the relationship between contemporary artists and their predecessors is an ongoing one. There is both the “despair” that comes from “the difficulty of measuring up” to their extraordinary accomplishments and the inspiring process of “looking at the lessons from antiquity, and [seeing] what can be achieved.” Second, the painting depicts a consumerist activity, one that would have resounded with the audience of an industrializing Western Europe and certainly resounds with a contemporary one. His purpose, Thurber suggests, was twofold. In one sense, showing the Romans in an everyday scene—admiring art, just as every viewer of the painting has done—helped his audience identify with their ancient predecessors. But his message perhaps was a touch graver. Extraordinary works of art surround the figures in the painting, yet their collective gaze is fixed on the center statue, which, according to Thurber, is the most expensive. Additionally, by placing special emphasis on other objects in the scene besides the sculptures—the bowl and bangle, for instance—both considered strictly inferior to the “fine arts” by the Academy, Alma-Tadema may have called the value of all art into question; it was this attention that garnered the painting’s least positive criticism when it was first exhibited at the Academy. Whatever the artist’s intent, however, the painting clearly possesses values surpassing even its marvelous technical feats.