A Roman Flower Market

Lawrence Alma-Tadema 1836 - 1912

Summary

A flowerseller, who has set up shop in the street outside a taberna, gestures to a potential customer. Each vignette in this scene from antiquity offers sensuous pleasure: the patrician couple strolling in fashionable clothing; the customers drinking in the wine shop; women drawing water from a well; the profusion of flowering plants and succulents. A wall on the left is inscribed with public notices, while the clean street and fine buildings give a sense of civic order. Alma-Tadema wrote that the young man was meant to represent a lover who was wondering which flowers to buy for his sweetheart. Nonetheless, the exchange between him and the young woman would have been open to interpretation by Victorian viewers, for whom flowersellers were associated with prostitution. Alma-Tadema was born in Holland, but became a British citizen in 1873. He specialised in historical genre scenes, before turning almost exclusively to depicting the ancient world following a visit to Florence, Rome, Naples and Pompeii in 1863.

Display Label

Gallery text panel In Pursuit of Beauty Late Victorian Art and Design Improving the quality of British art and design had been a concern since the 1850s. The British Empire had expanded into new continents but it was the classical ideal of beauty, based on Ancient Greek and Roman culture that was still considered the model for serious art. The pursuit of beauty was a form of escapism from the mass-production of industrial Britain. As well as looking to the ancient world, artists and designers were delighted and inspired by the arts of Renaissance Italy, the Middle and Far East. Many of the paintings here feature a beautiful woman. Sometimes she is a passive, decorative form, but often she is a dark and brooding femme fatale, a symbol of seduction, deception and destruction. The 'fatal woman' may reflect late Victorian male fears as women campaigned for equal rights and new roles. The emphasis on colour, harmony and rhythm and simplifying the form of an object would become major concerns in the 20th century. They can be seen emerging here in the work of late Victorian artists and designers.