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I first became aware of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s work when I was studying in Italy my senior year of college. There was a great exhibition of his work at the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Naples. Exhibited were about fifteen to twenty of his paintings, both watercolor and oil respectively. Displayed alongside examples of architectural and plant-life studies, and antique furniture that Alma-Tadema owned and incorporated into many of his paintings. He was portraying Romans romantically yet in a fairly historically accurate manner.

What drew me to Alma-Tadema was his sensitivity to painting. His paintings are small yet demand attention for their detail, vibrancy and incredible accuracy. His paintings are never over sweetened and always feel ‘just right,’ which is difficult to achieve at such a high level of realism. Because of this I hold him in the highest regards.

I have included several motifs such as the roses, a Mediterranean seaside, and a beautiful woman amongst the environment. Originally I planned for this to be a full tribute to Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera, but switched gears early on to aesthetically attribute this to Alma-Tadema. Primavera is a painting widely believed to represent the personification of spring, which is more intimately reinterpreted in my painting.