Pictorial Shakespeare, 1880-1890 - eTheses Repository - University ...

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Moore's independence took him to come strange lengths, producing
potentially surrealistic effects: Quartette shows a group of
demure and classically attired musicians performing before a
group of thoughtful onlookers, but the musical instruments
are moo era.
Alma-Tadema, a Dutch artist who had settled in England,
was the -most -eminent of the painters who used classical
themes and settings. Like Moore he eschewed the conventionally
"significant" scenes and literary subjects of earlier neoclassicist
painters (David, for example) and gave his men and
women an ideality unconnected with moral dignity. Reviewing
the retrospective of Tadema's paintings at the Grosvenor
Gallery, an anonymous columnist in Art and Letters claimed in
1883 thr.t the painter "found the courage to give the characters
of the classic age the common attributes of humanity":
A classic subject had hitherto been held to
demand from the artist the higher qualities of
style in the treatment of the human f ^m. Events
of history , in themselves devoid of poetical
suggestion, have been handled vdth the reverence
due to ideal themes, and though now and then the
power of the individual artist had availed to
secure a design of exceptional beauty, the
result as a rule has only the dull virtue of
an academic study.
The critic suggests how Alma-Tadema has broken with the old
classicism:
He does not affect to grant the forms with
v/hich he peoples the scenes of history the
abstract character and id< al beauty that belong
to the creations of ancient art. He selects
his various types with the instinct of a dramatist
who seoks to illustrate an epoch and not to
ennoble it... we are made to feel that the distinctions
that divi'-.e the ancient and modern world are
of less moment than the enduring attributes and the
uHCiian^irr; occupations of daily life by which tlicy
are united,
(II (1883) 121-2).
In a sense, Alma-Tadema adopted the realism in Pre-Raphaelite
painting - the realism which Hunt employed in depicting
the Virgin as a "bold matron" - but had refrained from using
it to emphasize the immediacy of an ethically significant
subject. Pro-capheelite realism was used to ^ive a vivid,
sometimes startling effect to subjects of great importance -
this part of their inheritance from -iotto caused great offence