Lawrence Alma-Tadema, The Roses of Heliogabalus, 1888

Private collection. Image here via: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Roses_of_Heliogabalus.jpg

Late nineteenth century art has long had a bad name. Hidebound, stale, sentimental… and that’s just a start! The onslaught against this era and its artists went deeper still, especially after the end of World War II. Victorian artists and their continental contemporaries were accused of prizing aesthetic perfection above any other consideration, and of chasing a neverland of classical fantasy that had no place in the modern world. 

To be honest, there’s a great deal of truth in all that. Academic art did often follow endless predictable tropes, always striving for the perfection of the unperfectable, with less and less artistic truth as the decades of the nineteenth century rolled by. And yet…

To consign these artists to the dustbin is wrong. Masters such as Leighton, Waterhouse, and Alma Tadema knew more about the craft of painting than any artist living today. That needs to be recognized. We can laugh at or even scorn the way they often projected the assumptions of their own time, but they still produced gorgeous paintings. Let’s celebrate them.

RJW F2415 Online (via Zoom)

A 5-hour short course, delivered via 2 x 2½-hour sessions on consecutive Wednesdays (24 April & 1 May, 2.00-4.30).

£40 (individual registration); £72 (for two people sharing one screen).