Pollice Verso by Jean-Leon Gérôme Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824 – 1904) was a French painter and sculptor in the style now known as academicism. The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects, bringing the academic painting tradition to an artistic climax. A special theme within Gérôme’s oeuvre of history pieces are the arena scenes he made between 1859 and 1883. They can be counted among his most popular and spectacular paintings and were reproduced and distributed on a large scale. These reproductions were used in various ways – for example for book illustrations or magic lanterns – and the images Gérôme created of ancient Rome have contributed to our perception of life in classical antiquity. One of Gérôme’s most famous arena scenes is Pollice Verso (1872). We see a gladiator in the Coliseum, his foot on his opponent’s chest. The face of the winning man is not visible through the helmet he is wearing, but his head is pointing upwards towards the audience. The gladiator on the ground raises …

The Beach near Trouville by Eugène Boudin The French painter Eugène-Louis Boudin (1824-1898) was born in Honfleur as the son of a ship’s captain. As a young boy, he worked on a steamboat that ran between Le Havre and Honfleur. But after he fell overboard and almost drown, his mother decided to send him to school. In 1835 his father abandoned seafaring and opened a store for stationery and frames in La Havre. Having opened up his own frame shop, the young Boudin came in contact with the artists Jean-François Millet and Jean-Baptist Isabey, who encouraged his early artistic pursuits. At the age of 22, Boudin shuttered his shop and started painting full-time. The majority of Boudin’s works are small landscapes of the harbors and beaches of the coast of northern France, informed by a keen eye for social detail. Up to the 19th century, the beach was a place where fishermen used to go to work and not a place to spend your spare time. However, from the mid-1800s, European elites began touting the …

The execution of the doge Marino Faliero by Eugène Delacroix In his paintings, the Romantic artist Eugène Delacroix (1798 – 1863) aimed to capture all the moments and emotions from a story that interested in one scene. A good example of this is The execution of the doge Marino Faliero (1826). The painting is a free interpretation of Byron’s drama with the same title, which was staged in both London and Paris shortly after its publication in 1821. The story takes place in fourteenth-century Venice and is about Marino Faliero, the 53rd Doge of Venice. Faliero had already passed the age of seventy and was – it is said – slightly senile when he was elected. He despised the nobility, who, he thought, looked down on him, and attempted a coup d’etat in April 1355, aiming to take effective power from the ruling aristocrats. The coup failed and Faliero was sentenced to death together with ten accomplices, after which his body was hanged at the Doge’s Palace. In The execution of the doge Marino, Delacroix …

  The Roses of Heliogabalus by Lawrence Alma-Tadema Beautiful Roman ladies relaxing in marble decors, carelessly leaning against an azure blue background or looking out over a calm sea. The interiors of Roman churches, archaeological excavations in Pompeii and everyday, lifelike scenes from classical antiquity take you on a journey to the past. The nineteenth-century Dutch painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema was born in 1836 in the province of Friesland in the north of the Netherlands. In 1852 the young Alma-Tadema went to Antwerp to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts there. The Antwerp Academy had a good reputation internationally and attracted a lot of foreign artists, many from the Netherlands. Tadema continued his studies in the studio of Louis De Taeye, who taught courses in history and historical costume at the Antwerp Academy. De Taeye introduced him to history books about the Merovingian period – which would become a lifelong fascination of the artist – and encouraged him to pursue historical accuracy in his paintings. In 1863 Tadema visited Naples and Pompeii, where he witnessed …