The Conversion of Paula by St. Jerome – Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1899

THE CONVERSION OF PAULA BY ST. JEROME

Photogravure published in 1899 by Arthur Tooth & Sons in London after the painting (Opus CCCL) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, coloured by a later hand. Size: approx. 37.5 × 82 cm.

The painting on which this heliogravure is based was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1898, where its outstanding technique and beauty led it to be hailed as a masterpiece. The art critic F.G. Stephens regarded The Conversion of Paula as one of Alma-Tadema’s finest achievements. Arthur Tooth & Sons, the art dealers who had commissioned the painting, thus had an important new work on their hands. Alma-Tadema’s letters to Stephens reveal that the painting had not been easy to complete and that the artist was greatly pleased by the critic’s praise.

Paula, dressed in a sumptuous purple and amber robe woven with gold, reclines against an altar dedicated to Bacchus. She listens to the charismatic but ascetic St Jerome, who is telling her about Christianity. Paula would later abandon the cult of Bacchus and devote herself to the new faith.

The work represents one of the relatively few explicitly Christian subjects in Alma-Tadema’s oeuvre. Ten years earlier, he had been criticised for the supposed lack of “moral purpose” in his painting “The Roses of Heliogabalus.”

Price: Euro 2.750,- (incl. frame)