Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema was a 19th century Dutch painter known for his Merovingian and Egyptian scenes. After visiting Pompeii in 1863, he began to create copies of genre paintings from the classical, Greco-Roman period. He was extremely skilled in painting marble; this was exemplified by the clarity of color and smooth finishes of his work. In the first decades of the 20th century, during “The Golden Age of Hollywood,” directors drew from Alma-Tadema’s paintings for the visual aspects of films like Intolerance (1916), Ben Hur (1926), Cleopatra (1934), and The Ten Commandments (1956).