Luscious Alma-Tadema show transports you to a gloriously realised ancient world

I must have been a peculiar child.

At the same time my friends were captivated by their Barbie collections, I was becoming obsessed with Greek and Roman mythology. Like many only children, I had an active imagination and created playmates in my head; but mine were younger versions of classical deities, and I concocted adventures on which I joined them as a young Vestal Virgin or a huntress of Diana. It's a shame I never wrote them down. I could have beaten the Percy Jackson franchise to market by decades.

On a childhood trip to LA, I was just as excited to explore the Getty Villa as I was Disneyland (I've written about the villa previously here). This perfect re-creation of the enormous Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum allowed me to walk within my fantasy world. And on its walls I found the work of an artist who seemed equally obsessed: Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Spring.* A poster version of the scene of young Romans processing through grand architecture bearing armfuls of flowers ended up sharing wall space with my Sean Cassidy and Donny Osmond posters when I got home. It outlasted the pop idols, staying with me through a progression of university dorm rooms until it fell to tatters.

I've loved Alma-Tadema ever since, but he's a difficult artist to see in any profusion. One of the most successful and prosperous painters in Victorian London, he built his career on perfectly-imagined, highly-detailed scenes of the classical world. Though he dabbled in Egyptians, Greeks and Etruscans, the Romans were his bread and butter. The British, at the height of Empire and confident in themselves as the New Romans, couldn't get enough of him. Queen Victoria even gave him a knighthood (despite the fact that he was a Dutch native). But he fell quickly and resoundingly out of fashion after his death.

As the post-WWI establishment embraced modernism, Alma-Tadema seemed to embody all they rejected. All Victorian painters followed a similar trajectory, but the Dutchman's celebration of history and ancient empires drew particular contempt. At his reputation's low point, the owners of his magnificent The Finding of Moses cut out and discarded the canvas because they could only find a buyer for the frame. Thus Alma-Tadema's work rarely shows up in any profusion. Many are still in private hands; museums tend to own one or two as an example of a genre type. There are no big collections of his work.

Which is why the Leighton House Museum's current show, Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity, is such a rare joy. It's the first time there's been any sort of collective exhibit of the artist's work in London since 1913. There are more than one hundred paintings here (sadly not including the Getty's Spring), given added context by being displayed throughout the exotically decorated home and studio of Alma-Tadema's contemporary, Frederic Lord Leighton. The men were friends with similar tastes. Alma-Tadema's home in St. John's Wood is much changed and not open to the public, but the layers of opulent decor, William Morris patterns and wood paneling at Leighton House provide the same environment these paintings would have been created in, and for.

The show takes us through Alma-Tadema's career in chronological order, starting with a precociously talented child who found his fascination with history early. His young imagination haunted the Dark and early Middle Ages, with a style pinched from the Golden Age of Dutch Art. He repeated the techniques deployed in genre scenes by great masters like Vermeer and Rembrandt to create luminous slices of life, caught mid-story and cropped tight on the action. One early work shows a dramatic scene from the obscure tale of the Merovingian Queen Fredegonda. She's schemed to have a trouble-making bishop eliminated, but her assassins haven't completed the job. Here, she sits cool and dignified in the bishop's bedchamber, facing down his accusing pointing finger as he struggles up from his bed, still bleeding from the head. It's Game of Thrones, Victorian style.

In 1863 Alma-Tadema married and headed off on an extended honeymoon around Italy. It would revolutionise his life. He fell in love with the glory that was Rome, washed in bright light, the blue seas, the white marble, and coloured mosaics. For the next 50 years, his work would be dominated by the classical world.

He quickly became known for his astonishing ability to handle texture. This is beautifully displayed in A Roman Lover of Art. Brass under a connoisseur's inspection shimmers with a dull metallic gleam. Water splashes brightly in a sun-drenched fountain. You know the linen folds of the togas would be heavy and crisp, while little irregularities in the mosaic floor would scratch your bare feet. The marble cladding of the walls in that shadowy corner would provide a cool retreat. It's this kind of reality that pulls us in to a world of storytelling as compelling as any historical film.

We encounter couples in the middle of intense conversations, a girl hiding from her suitor as her sister blocks the door, Hadrian visiting a British pottery to endorse the local economy, people engaging in religious ceremonies, the architect of the Coliseum caught in contemplation. In each, the artist captures a scene at a pregnant pause in the action, much as the best modern news photographers do. You can't help but imagine a continuing storyline for yourself.

Alma-Tadema became particularly famous for his ability to paint marble. There's a wonderful pair of  paintings displayed together that shows off both this, and the artist's frustration with patrons not understanding the breadth of his vision. A wealthy northern industrialist commissioned the painting which becameAn Audience with Agrippa; the general and close friend of Augustus strides formally down stairs overlooked by a monumental statue of the Emperor, followed by his staff and awaited by his clients. The industrialist wasn't happy. Too many people, not enough marble. So Alma-Tadema painted the scene again, but After the Audience. The supplicants have gone. We catch Agrippa's back and the rest of his staff trailing away in the shadows. The industrialist's new version was a big, empty stage set: plenty of marble, story over.

The artist could afford that kind of precociousness because he'd become one of the most famous people in London. His homes and studios were lavishly decorated settings for both his painting and sophisticated parties drawing the fashionable and artistic of the age. Several rooms in the exhibit plunge us into his life, introducing us to his wives (both pre-deceased him, but the second was a well-known artist in her own right and worked beside him for decades) and his artistically talented daughters. We see interiors of his ridiculously lavish home in St. John's Wood, which leaves little wonder why the never-married Alma-Tadema daughters ended their days in straightened circumstances. The artist was clearly as good at spending his money as at making it.

But Alma-Tadema isn't just about beautiful gateways to other worlds. His use of realism to draw you into a story stirs real emotion. Many of his works are gently soothing; beautiful women gazing out to sea or stretched on the atrium floor contemplating fish in the pond. There's a rare contemporary scene called 94 in the Shade (that would be 34 for you celsius users) that shows a young man reading in the shade next to a freshly-mown wheat field; it's the distillation of all the delight of a lazy summer's day. But there's heartbreak here, as well. After his second wife died, he painted a young woman who resembled her sitting alone and sad on a shady bench while the sunny fields beyond are filled with people at play. Less subtle is the dramatic The Death of the First-Born. The Egyptian Pharaoh occupies his throne in a dim room given a ghostly glow as low light bounces off golden interiors. His dead son sprawls in his lap, his weeping wife slumped over the body. The priests who have failed to save the boy sit around in various stages of depression and horror. But Pharaoh looks directly at us, deadened with shock and eyes glistening with tears.

It's perhaps the most powerful painting in this exhibit, and it probably looks familiar. In fact, even if you've never seen any Alma-Tadema, all of this stuff will tug at your awareness. The penultimate room of the exhibit explains why. Even as his paintings were rejected by the art world, Alma-Tadema quietly became the patron saint of historic film set designers. A continuous loop of film clips proves the point. Cecil B. DeMille blatantly copied The Death of the First-Born and Alma-Tadema's other Egyptian imaginings for his epic Ten Commandments. Pretty much every early sword and sandal epic used him as a guide. Ridley Scott's team admits to returning to this source for their vision of Rome in Gladiator, and no doubt did the same for the less-worthy but equally beautiful Exodus: Gods and Kings. And though it's not included in the clips, I'd be shocked if the design of Kings Landing in Westeros didn't have some roots here.

Alma-Tadema's reputation has, thankfully, rebounded. The once near-worthless Finding of Moses became the most expensive Victorian painting ever sold at auction six years ago in New York. It's here, restored to its frame in all its glory. Hanging beside the luscious Roses of Heliogabalus, these two huge canvases anchor the final gallery where we're surrounded by the glory of the artist's last decade.

Even with recovering popularity I doubt we'll see many more Alma-Tadema exhibits in one lifetime. Many of these paintings come from private collections. Getting their owners to loan them, plus assembling others by ones and twos from across the world, was a monumental task I don't expect to be repeated. So if you're at all intrigued by time travel to the ancient world, get to Leighton House before 26 October.

Leighton House is run by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Admission is £12, though National Trust and Art Fund members get a significant discount. Be sure to lay out the additional £1 to get the audio guide, which has far more detail than is available in the free show programme or the display labels. 

I wrote an earlier article about the museum here.

*Since my first discovering it, Spring has moved to the Getty Centre in LA, while the Villa's collections are now restricted to art from ... rather than evoking ... the ancient world.