![]() ![]() This time around, we didn’t neglect that story, but we wanted to avoid a simplistic presentation of Alma-Tadema’s pictures as “Victorians in togas”. In 1996, we presented this pre-Raphaelite artist as “the archaeologist of artists”, the painter of ancient everyday life informed by new findings from the excavations being made in the 19th century. The Fries Museum, in Alma-Tadema’s hometown of Leeuwarden, wanted to celebrate its local boy, but it agreed that we needed to tell a new story. The exhibition took shape as a collaboration (also involving the Amsterdam film historian Ivo Blom) and collaboration is also the key word for the story that the exhibition and catalogue tell. When I learned that we would be able to collaborate with Peter Trippi, with whom I co-curated an exhibition on John William Waterhouse in 2008-10, I was sold. However, Van der Velden is a persuasive man and his enthusiasm piqued my interest. How could I put together another show, 20 years on, that would not repeat the previous one? ![]() That was a groundbreaking project and my first significant experience as a curator. Back in 1996, I had been involved in the first major Alma-Tadema retrospective since the artist’s own day, at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery and Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. ![]() When Frank van der Velden of the Fries Museum in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands, first phoned me to suggest a new exhibition on the19th-century Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, I hesitated. ![]()
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