Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M., R.A.

W. Paisley Esq., by whom sold Sotheby's, Belgravia, 27 March 1973, lot 35 to Julian Hartnoll, London, where purchased by the present owner

Sheffield City Art Gallery, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1976, no.30

Rudolph Dircks, 'The Later Works of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, O.M., R.A.', special Christmas issue of Art Journal, 1910, p.31;
Vern Swanson, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1977, illustrated colour plate 10

The sheet appears to be sound; a minor spot of foxing in the lower right corner otherwise the work appears in good overall condition. Held under glass in a Greco-Roman tabernacle frame; unexamined out of frame.
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NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

A Balneatrix painted in 1876, is one of Tadema's earliest depictions of every-day life at a Roman thermae (bath-house) - a subject that became one of his favourite. It depicts a balneatrix, a bathing-attendant who worked in the rooms secluded for the female baths. She is holding a tray with neatly folded towels for the women to dry themselves after bathing in the various thermae. She smiles as though greeting one of her bathing clients. Through the curtain heavily embroidered with flower tendrils and butterflies, can be seen a tantalising glimpse of two naked women - one submerged in the water and the other drying her feet. The view is both titilating and intimately perceptive, depicting a scene in a private female space. As has been noted about another bathing picture by Tadema, the title and setting; '... provided a respectably academic excuse, replete with archaeological reconstructions... for a voyeuristic sortie into a world normally barred to Victorian men.' (Russell Ash, p.58) Some of Tadema's thermae pictures were fairly tame such as The Frigidarium of 1890 (private collection) in which a balneatrix is reclothing a patrician lady outside the cold bathings pools where a bevy of naked girls remain undressed, or An Apodyterium of 1886 (private collection) which depicts a Roman changing room where most of the women are clothed. However, In the Tepidarium of 1881 (Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight) is among the most erotically-charged pictures painted in the nineteenth century.  In 1899 Tadema returned to the subject of thermae in one of his most accomplished paintings The Baths of Caracalla (collection of Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber) and as late as 1909 he remained fascinated with bathing scenes and painted A Favourite Custom (Tate).

In 1875 Tadema painted A Nymphaeum which depicted a balneatrix carrying her tray of towels into a female bathing area and looking back over her shoulder at the spectator. A Balneatrix was another treatment of the same subject and may have been made while the artist was painting the small oil painting An Antique Custom of 1876 (Hamburger Kunstalle, Hamburg) in which a very similar figure appears.

The watercolour is a wonderful display of Tadema's dexterity in painting different marbles. the coolness of which is contrasted with the rosy warmth of the girl's skin and the bright blue summer sky. It is comparable in quality with a watercolour of three bathers cavorting in a fountain painted in the same year, Strigils and Sponges (British Museum, London). In 1877 Tadema painted a watercolour of the male equivalent of the present picture A Balneator (Christie's, 16 June 2010, lot 166) probably as a pendant as they are of similar dimensions. In June 1877 Tadema also painted an oil on panel of A Balneatrix, the only known example of Tadema painting an oil replica of an earlier watercolour.