Autumn – Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1879
€1.950
“The Seasons: A Roman Idyll—Autumn”, also known as “The Red of Fire”. Steel engraving made in 1879 by Auguste Blanchard after the painting (Opus CLXXV) by Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Signed in pencil by Blanchard and Alma-Tadema. Coloured by a later hand. Size (engraving): 33 x 13,5 cm (frame: 59 x 37 cm).
A lone bacchante dances to celebrate the year’s wine harvest. She wears a leopard skin and a laurel wreath on her head- traditional symbols of the cult of Bacchus. The young woman’s dress is in the Greek style, falling around her in vertical, sculptural folds; her leaping posture, too, is derived from relief figures of dancing maenads.
Set in a Roman cellar, this scene depicts a domestic ritual. The bacchante pours a wine offering from a so-called rhyton (a drinking vessel) shaped like a ram’s head over a burning brazier. A polished bronze bust of Bacchus presides over the ceremony. The amphora marked “Herculaneum” may allude to Pliny’s account of the intoxicating wine from the region around Vesuvius, while the stoppers of the jars emerging from the sandy cellar floor match his description of how wine was traditionally stored in the ground.
Price: Euro 1.950,- (incl. frame)
RESERVED
