Reading from Homer – Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ca. 1885

€2.950

Victorian Era photogravure after Lawrence Alma-Tadema's A Reading from Homer, showing a Greek poet reciting to an audience on a marble terrace.
Reading from Homer - Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ca. 1885 - Image 2
Victorian Era photogravure after Lawrence Alma-Tadema's A Reading from Homer, showing a Greek poet reciting to an audience on a marble terrace.
Reading from Homer - Lawrence Alma-Tadema, ca. 1885 - Image 2

A READING FROM HOMER – VICTORIAN ERA PHOTOGRAVURE AFTER LAWRENCE ALMA-TADEMA

“A Reading from Homer“, photogravure made by the Berlin Photographic Company around 1885, after the celebrated painting (Opus CCLXVII) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. With original hand colouring. Size: approx. 41.5 × 83 cm. In its original frame.

A young rhapsode, holding a papyrus scroll, recites the epic poetry of Homer to an attentive audience gathered on a sunlit marble terrace overlooking the turquoise waters of the Aegean Sea. Crowned with a laurel wreath, the storyteller gestures towards his listeners, who appear completely absorbed in his performance.

The reader’s marble seat was inspired by the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens. The variety of costumes worn by his audience suggests the universal appeal of Homer‘s poetry. The elegantly dressed figure, partially cut off at the far left, contrasts sharply with the reclining young man in the foreground, who wears a simple goatskin garment.

Not everyone appreciated Alma-Tadema’s interpretation of classical antiquity. One contemporary critic complained that the figures’ facial features were “of a low order” and considered them inappropriate for the dignity of the subject. Alma-Tadema, however, embraced the nineteenth-century view of Homer as a popular poet whose works appealed to a broad audience, rather than belonging exclusively to an intellectual elite.

Perhaps Alma-Tadema also hoped that his own artistic interpretation of Homer would reach a similarly wide audience. Indeed, A Reading from Homer became widely known through engravings, photogravures and other reproductions. Whereas the artist’s original paintings commanded prices affordable only to wealthy collectors, these reproductions brought his celebrated visions of classical antiquity into the homes of a much wider public.

The original painting, commissioned by the American collector Henry Gurdon Marquand, is now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Price: Euro 2.950,- (incl. frame)