Small Parlor Classical Print

In the nineteenth century famous paintings were often copied as prints and circulated to a mass audience. This is a lithograph after the British artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s painting completed in 1885 and now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Alma-Tameda’s career spanned more than sixty years during which he focused almost exclusively on classical scenes like this one, imagining the people and their surroundings in minute detail. It’s the attention to detail that appealed to proponents of the Aesthetic Movement who were deeply concerned with the artfulness of day-to-day objects.