Consulter la cote et le prix de Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M., R.A. (1836-1912)

Description : A Juggler signed and dated 'L. Alma-Tadema 1870' (upper right) oil on panel 31 x 191/2 in. (78.7 x 50.1 cm.) PROVENANCE Commissioned by Ernest Gambart, 1870. Jose de Murietta, Marquis de Santurce; Christie's, 30 April 1892, lot 149 (810 gns. to Tooth). Mr Biesing; Diligentia, The Hague, December 1893. N.A. Streengracht Van Moyland; Messrs Alfred Preyer, Amsterdam, 10 September 1895, lot 102 (12,000 guilders to Braskamp). Stephen G. Holland, London, by 1897; Christie's, 25 June 1908, lot 110 (300 gns. to Wallace). Private collection, Texas, sold 1977. With Maurice Sternberg Galleries, Chicago. With Charles Jerdein, London. With Auslander and Wittgenstein, New York, 1984-5. LITERATURE Athenaeum, no. 2219, 7 May 1870, pp. 618-9. Illustrated London News, 14 May 1870, p. 503. Atkinson J. Beavington, 'Contemporary Art - Poetic and Positive: Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Alma-Tadema', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 133, March 1883, p. 404. Carel Vosmaer and others, Alma-Tadema Catalogue Raisonn‚, unpublished manuscript, 1885, no. 94. A.G. Temple, The Art of Painting in the Queen's Reign, 1897, pp. 192-3, illustrated. Magazine of Art, 1903, pp. 519-20. Percy Cross Standing, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1905, p. 50, illustrated. Rudolf Dircks, 'The Later Works of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema', Art Annual, Christmas 1910, p. 27. Vern G. Swanson, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1977, p. 136. Russell Ash, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1989, pl. 3. Vern G. Swanson, The Biography and Catalogue Raisonn‚ of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1990, p. 156, no. 119 (as 'location unknown'). EXHIBITION London, Royal Academy, 1870, no. 153. London, Grosvenor Gallery, The Works of L. Alma-Tadema, Winter 1882, no. 27. London, Guildhall, Corporation Loan Exhibition, 1897, no. 104. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum, and Liverpool, Walker Art Gallery, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1997, no. 20. NOTES Listed as 'location unknown' in Vern Swanson's 1990 catalogue, this is a comparatively early work, painted the year that Alma-Tadema settled in London as a result of the Franco-Prussian War. Significantly enough, it was commissioned by Ernest Gambart, the great entrepreneurial dealer who had been promoting his work in England and encouraged him to make this move. It was exhibited at the Royal Academy the same year (the artist's second appearance on its walls), and described at length by F.G. Stephens in the Athenaeum for the benefit of those who had not seen the photograph that had become 'well known in Paris, and, we believe, in London.' The scene is set in the elegantly appointed peristyle of a handsome Pompeian villa, where an Egyptian juggler performs what Stephens calls 'a wonderful "egg-trick"' before a patrician audience. Stephens continues: 'The performer, a tall, lithe, lean, and intensely nervous-looking fellow, stands, girt by a loin-cloth only, so that we see the effect of excitement upon his every limb, from the toes that firmly press the earth, gripping it, so to say, to the elastic knees, with the creases of thin olive-coloured skin upon them, marking muscle, tendon and bone in an exquisite manner, - to the firmly-held shoulders and rigid neck, with the watchful, well poised head and face, which is slightly upturned to the white eggs, that go flying from his dextrous and lissom fingers to high above his head. Some catch the light when the sun slants across the atrium ; others fall into the shade; all fall truly to his hands. Those hands perform the trick; the arms move only from the elbows, which are almost pinned to the hips of the performer. M. Alma-Tadema never designed a more telling figure than this: from the top of the outlandish-looking head-dress to the steadfast, gripping toes, all is life-like; and the painting is admirable. Watching the man, sit four Romans, of diverse temperaments of body and moods of mind. Puzzled as they look, there is, with all that, an expression of lordly contempt, which is humourously given in the face of the fat master of the house, who sits, and is content to be amused. Not so his shrewder son, in whom one recognizes a face that was once well known; he scans the flying eggs with anxious, half-laughing, half-envious eyes, and, extending his fingers and thumbs, makes each of his hands span the other: a good and characteristic action. Two others sit on the further side from us of the old gentleman. At the end of the cloister, below the picture on the wall, which illustrates a deed of Roman virtue, sits the mistress of the house on a couch, wearing what is called a "false front", or head-dress of borrowed hair, such as Martial satirized, and such as often appears in busts of Roman matrons of "a certain age". Near her is a woman, with hair dyed red, the subject of another of Martial's epigrams. How little he dreamed that, some eighteen hundred years after his time, such follies would re-appear on the banks of the Seine and Thames!'. Characteristically Alma-Tadema, who had spent part of his honeymoon in Pompeii in 1863 and generally wintered at Naples, realises his theme with archaeological precision. On the left stands a bronze of the young Hercules wrestling with snakes, now in the Museo Nazionale at Naples, and the bronze stag partly obscurred by the arcade of Corinthian columns comes from the Villa of Papyri near Herculaneum. The painting on the far wall represents the drunken Bacchus and his followers, and probably also had an antique source. But not everything here is authentic. As Russell Ash observes ( loc. cit. ), 'here too we see one of (Alma-Tadema's) cleverly designed studio sofas, with Pompeian motifs on one side and Egyptian on the other, that reappear in many of (his) works. After (his) death one was sold with the contents of his house and is now in the Victorian and Albert Museum' (see Alma-Tadema Exhibition, Amsterdam and Liverpool, 1997, cat. no. 87, illustrated, although this example dates from c. 1890). Many of the elements in the picture were to recur in another work, A Roman Art Lover (The Runner) (Milwawkee Art Centre, Milwawkee, Wisconsin; Swanson, 1990, no.120, illus.) which was completed only one month later. As Vern Swanson points out in his catalogue raisonn‚, A Juggler occupies an interesting place in the transition from Egyptian to Roman subjects which took place at this stage of Alma-Tadema's career. Hitherto he had painted Egyptian subjects within the Roman era, an example being Egyptian Chess-Players, a watercolour of 1868 which was sold in these Rooms on 11 June 1993, lot 95. In A Juggler for the first time he subtly shifts the balance, introducing an Egyptian element into a Roman setting. From now on the Roman context would become paramount, and this particular combination of cultures occurs only twice more in his work, The Egyptian Architect of 1875 and The Meeting of Anthony Cleopatra of 1883. The latter was also sold in these Rooms on 11 June 1993, lot 123.
Prix: 0.00 USD 🔓Accès libre sans carte bancaire.
Estimations(basse-haute) : 412500 USD-577500 USD 🔓Accès libre sans carte bancaire.

Détails