Unconscious Rivals by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Unconscious Rivals (1893) by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912) is certainly not my favourite example of the artist’s work (that is In the Tepidarium) but it has resonance for other reasons . In my first year at University my girlfriend, C, was a lovely redhead who, like me, was enamoured of classicist paintings. Her best friend, the dark haired K, and I were close too and C thought that “the lascivious K” was pursuing me romantically. K was surprised to learn this and as a joke bought me a postcard of this painting, as it ‘depicted her and C being rivals’. Last year K and I visited the Alma-Tadema exhibition at Leighton House and saw the original (it is usually in the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery). We recalled more torrid times with the amusement that comes from thirty eight years of distance.

I always thought that the setting was rather unusual in that it placed the women in a sort of Roman aircraft hangar.  I don't know of any classical building it is based on which is unusual for Alma-Tadema who was scrupulous about his classical sources.  The cupid here, for example, is based on one found at Pompeii, somewhere the artist had visited.

The sweet siesta of a summer day by JW Godward

The sweet siesta of a summer day (1891), was one of the early successes for the neo-classicist painter John William Godward (1861-1922), It was exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 1891. Very much in the Alma-Tadema style, it is almost a pastiche of such paintings, with its languid girls in classical dresses, marble steps, a tiger skin, distant view of the Mediterranean, hanging vines etc. One of the girls is playing an aulos, as Godward tried to create a feeling of delicate flute music, Today, however, we know that the aulos was a martial instrument, used by the Spartan army and gave out a rather raucous buzzing sound not unlike a crumhorn. Not very restful! 

It was painted in his London studio in Smith Street in Chelsea and I actually went to a party there, with my Chinese American girlfriend, back in the mid eighties. She later modelled for some nude pastels for me,  I didn't know it had been Godward's studio at the time, though.  Perhaps that is why I found her so inspiring!

Godward ran off to Italy with one of his models and his parents, never keen on his choice of profession in the first place, never spoke to him again and even cut his picture out of all the family photos. Depressed by the march of modernism he committed suicide in 1922 by gassing himself in his oven at home, leaving a note which said "the world is not big enough for myself and a Picasso"