Lot 28: Girl on the stairs

Laura, Lady Alma-Tadema (1852-1909) Girl on the stairs indistinctly signed and inscribed 'Laura TAT OPXV...' (upper right) oil on canvas 10 x 7 in. (25.4 x 17.8 cm.)

Laura Theresa Epps met the Dutch artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema at a party given by the Madox-Browns in Fitzroy Square in the winter of 1869-70. She was seventeen, he thirty-three. Though well-known on the continent, he was already contemplating settling in England, where his work was popular, and falling in love with Laura at first sight finally determined him to make the move. On his arrival she became his pupil, and they married eighteen months later.

Laura wisely avoided the elaborate reconstructions of the ancient world that were her husband's speciality, but the influence of Dutch 17th Century painting, latent in his meticulous technique, was overt in her own homely genre scenes, which are usually vaguely 17th Century in detail and feeling. She also cultivated this element in the lavish and highly eclectic interiors which the couple created first at Townshend House, Regent's Park, where they settled on their marriage, and then at 17 Grove End Road, St John's Wood, to which they moved in 1886. The house had belonged to James Tissot during his years in London, but he had left it precipitately to return to Paris on the death of his mistress, Kathleen Newton, in 1882. 'In the details of domestic life, Dutch habits, Dutch furniture, and Dutch dress of the gentler and more courtly sort in the seventeenth century', wrote Alice Meynell, 'Mrs Alma-Tadema has found unconventional, honest and ... homely grace ... The artist has surrounded herself by relics and remains of the time and the country she loves, ... and thus her pictures seem to be produced within a genuine little Holland, in a genuine seventeenth century, without the blunders of ordinary historical research' (Art Journal, 1883, p. 345). Laura exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy from 1873. She also supported the Grosvenor and New Galleries, the Paris Salon and the Berlin Academy, and was one of only two English women artists to contribute to the International Exhibition in Paris in 1878.

Laura Alma-Tadema painted the present work very early in her marriage to Sir Lawrence, when the couple were visiting Jules Dalou in France in June 1874. The young girl in the painting is most probably Georgette Dalou, the sculptor's beloved only daughter. Two years later, in November 1876, Lawrence Alma-Tadema would paint Portrait of Aimes-Jules Dalou, his wife and his daughter (Opus CLXVI) in return for a bust of his wife sculpted by Dalou.

We are grateful to Professor Vern Swanson of the Springville Museum, Utah, for his help in preparing this catalogue entry.