Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema

As the artist’s contemporary biographer Percy Cross Standing noted of Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s early paintings of Egyptian subjects in particular, ‘So careful at all times about detail, he took extraordinary care in the preparation of his preliminary sketches for these pictures.’ 

Vern Swanson has suggested that this drawing, part of a group of early drawings by Alma-Tadema, may be related to two paintings of Egyptian subjects, entitled Going to the Oracle and The Contrary Oracle, that the artist seems to have planned in 1857 and 1858, but which were either never executed, or else destroyed. (During his student years Alma-Tadema often destroyed or painted over paintings which he was unhappy with.) 

The studies of male nudes on the versos of this drawing provides a rare insight into Alma-Tadema’s working process. Such academic studies from the posed model indicate that, at least at this early stage in his career, the artist initially studied the figures in his compositions as nudes, before adding drapery.