Roman Bathing Venus 3: By Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

In the Tepidarium (1881)

This, in Triple P's opinion, is the apotheosis of the classical subject as an excuse for an erotic nude in Victorian painting.   One of a series of Roman bathing pictures by the man born as Lourens Alma-Tadema in Dronrijp in the Netherlands in 1836, he took up the classical bathing theme having seen a number of similarly themed pictures by that other pillar of Victorian classicism, Lord Leighton.  Whilst Leighton set his bathing pictures in the world of Ancient Greece, however, Alma Tadema's classical bathers were all Roman.

Alma-Tadema's father died when he was four, leaving him with a sister and three elder half-brothers by his father's first wife.  His mother engaged a drawing tutor for the older boys and the young Louren's joined them showing an immediate facility.  He was destined for a career in the law but was diagnosed as consumptive as a teenager and wasn't expected to live long.  His mother let him give up his formal studies so  he could carry on drawing and painting in the short time she thought he had left to him.  Alma-Tadema unexpectedly recovered his health and began formal training in art at the age of sixteen at the Royal Academy of Fine Art in Antwerp where he studied for four years.  He voluntarily gave up his formal training to work on commissions and started by painting subjects relating to the history of Belgium and Holland.

Gallo-Roman Women (1865)

In 1862 Alma-Tadema went to London where he visited the British Museum and its collection of Egyptian, Greek and Roman antiquities. On returning home he started work on some Egyptian-themed works using things he had seen in the museum as inspiration.  In September 1863 he married Pauline and took his honeymoon in Italy visiting Rome and Pompeii.  Pauline is something of a mysterious character and Alma-Tadema only mentioned her once, to say he had got married, in his writings.  In 1865 he painted his first Roman-themed work, Gallo-Roman Women and from then on paintings set in Ancient Rome became his mainstay.  Pauline died in 1869 and later that year, unwell himself, he visited London again for medical treatment where he met seventeen year old Laura Epps, the daughter of a famous society physician (he had been Emily Bronte's doctor, for example).

Laura-Theresa Epps (1871)

Fed up with the largely negative reception to his paintings in Brussels and struck by Laura, Alma-Tadema moved to London, where paintings of classical subjects were much more popular, permanently in 1870.  He never lost his Dutch accent and indeed never really learned to speak English at all fluently but as a painter he was an enormous success. Engaged as Laura Epps painting tutor they married the following year and she started to model for him.  He was thirty four, she eighteen.  Some credit Laura for his London success as she apparently told him to brighten up his paintings and make them commercial as she didn't want to live in penury for the rest of her life.  In 1873 he changed his name from Lourens to the Anglicised Lawrence.

In the Tepidarium was painted ten years later in 1881 and is almost unique in Alma-Tadema's ouevre.  He rarely painted nudes except as small figures in larger, historical settings as we shall see shortly.  Despite being in the lukewarm room of the baths his subject has a flushed, almost sweaty face.  She contemplates an outrageously phallic strigil, used to scrape oil off the body. The curve of this historically accurately rendered object seems to echo the curve of her hip and thigh and generates images of it stroking her pliant body.  The loosely held peacock fan appears to be about to drop from her fingers such is her lethargic, abandoned state.  It covers her groin whilst also drawing attention to it; the tips of its feathers caressing the area enticingly.  Her right leg presses against her left one almost as if she is rubbing them together.  This is a highly sexual painting.

Apart from the strigil and the marble there is little that justifies the nude, in Victorian terms, by its historical setting.  It is really just an eroticised vision of a contemporary naked woman dropped into a (barely) historical setting.

The original picture is tiny: Triple P saw it in an exhibition in London once and if you click on the image above what you see on your computer is probably larger that the original which is just 13" x 9" (24cm x 33 cm).  At the size of one of Alma-Tadema's regular paintings the erotic effect would have been overpowering.  For example, referring to his much larger A Sculptor's model (1877) the Bishop of Carlisle observed: "To exhibit a life-size life-like almost photographic representation of a beautiful naked woman strikes my inartistic mind as somewhat if not very mischievous."

The Sculptor's Model (1877)

This picture was produced for the painter John Collier's father.  He had wanted Alma-Tadema to take on his son as a pupil which Alma-Tadema (as usual -Laura Epps was an exception) refused to do.  He did, however, let John sit in on the creation of this picture which was done in the nature of an instructive piece.  After this Alma-Tadema did not paint any more single nudes (other than In the Tepidarium) unless they were incidental figures in larger compositions.

An Apodyterium (1886)

A good example of this is his next Roman bath house picture, An Apodyterium (changing room), painted in 1886.  The only nude figure is just off centre removing her shoe. The main figure, on the left, looks at the viewer who knows she is about to undress.  The erotic charge is much more subtle as we imagine what we could see shortly.  This painting was voted "picture of the year" by the Pall Mall Gazette.

The Frigidarium (1890)

An Apodyterium was bought by Sir Max Waechter who commissioned a companion piece, The Frigidarium in 1890.  It has a similar right hand side weighted composition but the naked women in this have dropped even further into the background as they sit around the cold pool in the baths.  Waechter a  German-born but naturalised British business man and art collector is best remembered for ensuring the preservation of the magnificent view of the River Thames from Richmond Hill by preventing development on its lower slopes.

Thermae Antoninianae (1899)

Alma-Tadema's penultimate Roman bath painting is the Thermae Antoninianae (also known as the Baths of Caracalla) of 1899.  A spectacular rendition of the architecture of the baths in Rome it contains a myriad of figures, in contrast to his earlier works.  As his bath house paintings progressed they contained more figures as if he was zooming out from the solitary figure from In The Tepidarium to encompass the entirety of the bath house experience.  This image mixes men and women, something that happened only in certain times in Roman history; usually the two sexes bathed at different times of day.  One critic observed that this scene showed how "the frivolous society of the decaying Empire lives again in this picture."  Alma-Tadema later declared it to be his favourite painting,  That same year he was knighted.

A Favourite Custom (1909)

His final bath house painting, A Favourite Custom, brings the nudes to the fore again as two young ladies desport in the water,  It was painted in 1909 the year his wife Laura, who had become a very well regarded painter in her own right, died during a visit to Hindhead in Surrey at the age of 58.  Alma-Tadema was heartbroken and the following year only managed one painting.  He died in Wiesbaden, which he was visiting for health reasons, in 1912, and is buried in the crypt of St Paul's Cathedral..  

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912)

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Roman Bathing Venus 2: In the Tepidarium by John William Godward

In the Tepidarium (1913)

The classicist painter John William Godward didn't paint many nudes; largely relying on form fitting drapery to provide sensuous effect.  We looked at one of his earlier pictures, Venus Binding her Hair (1897) in a previous post and explored his life until that point.  In the Tepidarium was painted sixteen years later in Rome, rather than Chelsea, and is altogether a less monumental piece than the 90" tall Venus; this painting being around 40" tall.

Godward was driven away from his house, in 1905, due to the noise from the construction of the new Chelsea Football Club ground at Stamford Bridge.  He took the opportunity to travel to Italy for the first time. Godward stayed in Capri but travelled around southern Italy, sketching. 

In the Tepidarium pencil sketch (1913)

In the period 1910 to 1912 Godward moved to Rome more permanently and lived there, off and on, for a decade.  Godward was finding that London was becoming  hostile to his style of painting, as more modernist art held sway.  He hoped that Rome might be more appreciative of his style.  In addition, it seems that he left London to run off with his model, an Italian beauty.  It was said that his mother never forgave him for this unseemly behaviour, especially as she had never wanted him to become an artist in the first place.

Godward acquired a studio at the Villa Strohl-Fern in Parioli (now a very smart suburb of Rome, full of ambassadors' residences) at the edge of the Borghese Gardens (where Triple P used to go running and to the Roman Sport Centre gym, built underneath them).  Alfred Strohl-Fern (1847-1926) was an Alsatian who built the villa  in 1879.  The property had extensive wooded grounds which Strohl-Fern filled with classical statuary, grotoes and follies. By 1882 he had added nine artists studios and it soon became a creative colony, attracting painters, sculptors and musicians.  One of the first artists to visit, thirty years before Godward, was Arnold Böcklin, the Swiss painter of The Isle of the Dead which inspired Rachmaninov's symphonic poem of the same name. 

Godward's studio at the Villa Strohl-Fern

Godward's studio was at no 2 Villa Strohl-Fern and he spent every waking hour painting there.  In the Tepidarium was painted there in 1913; a good year for Godward, as he had won the gold medal at the Rome International Exhibition with The Belvedere.  This must have been a major filip for a painter who was feeling increasingly rejected at home.

Study for In the Tepidarium (1913)

There is an oil study for this painting  which has the figure lightly clad in a diaphonous gown.  Godward often changed his pictures from the original drawings or sketches and in this case we can see that he has moved the rather dominating curtain from in front of the figure to behind her in the final painting.  He then counters this block of colour with another drape on the other side of the figure, whose brighter colour provides more balance than the darker example in the sketch.  This sketch was sold by Christies in New York for $8,000 in 1994. 

The draperies in the finished picture, which was sold for £25,000 in 1984, are perhaps not Godward's best and he always struggled with the nude figure but what is marvellous in this painting is his treatment of the interior decoration.  At this point, perhaps inspired by the warmer weather in Rome, nearly all of Godward's paintings had an exterior setting so this was a rare incursion indoors.  His handling of the marble in this painting (especially that of the square column, back centre) is superb.  Even this pales in comparison to his rendering of the tesserae on the floor. Each one individually painted but shaded in such a way that the depressions in the floor can be seen by the alignment of the individual tiles. This must have been based on something he had seen in Rome, we suspect.

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Roman Bathing Venus 1: by Roy Krenkel

We have decided to start a series of pictures of women in Roman baths but rather than beginning with one of the usual Victorian classicist paintings we were very taken by this fine study by American illustrator Roy G Krenkel (1918-1983) whilst researching some pictures for our Cavegirls in Fur Bikinis blog.

Although Krenkel studied at the Art Student's League in the late thirties he was largely self-taught and was influenced by many things (he was an inveterate museum visitor, for example).  However, his voluptuously curvy women were certainly influenced by the work of the Australian painter Norman Lindsay the subject of one of Agent Triple P's favourite films, Sirens (1993).

This sketch and the finished drawing above feature the tepidarium of the Baths of Caracalla.  These thermae (public baths) were built quite late in the Roman period (begun in 212 AD) and were the largest in the world on completion in 217 AD.  Covering a massive 27 acres they had seating for 1600 people.  Named after Emperor Caracalla (this was a nickname, he was actually called  Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), during whose reign they were built, they continued as functional baths until 573 AD when invading Goths destroyed the aqueduct that supplied them with water.

Tepidarium of Caracalla (detail)

Krenkel has depicted both men and women sharing the facilities at the same time whereas, in fact, access to  thermae for men and women was seperated by time, with women visiting from first thing in the morning until 2.00pm.  After this men had access until dusk.  Interestingly, women were charged double what the men paid.  Although technically men and women weren't supposed to be at the baths at the same time, and no well bought up Roman woman would dream of being so, prostitutes did frequent the baths at the same time as the men; although this was often officially banned by various emperors.  Krenkel's women depicted here, therefore must be of the "loose" type!

The baths today. Just behind the ugly white building at top left (the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation) can be seen the site of the Circus Maximus

Agent Triple P has visited the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla in Rome and they are still very imposing, despite the depredations of earthquakes and the looting of stones for building materials. Many years ago, when Triple P was in Rome, setting up an office for his firm, we used to run past the baths whilst training for the London Marathon as they were on the road that led to the Via Appia Antica, which was our favoured training route.

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