Always Welcome, from "Illustrated London News"
Engraver William Biscombe Gardner British
After Laura Alma-Tadema British
Not on view
Laura Epps became a student of Lawrence Alma-Tadema in 1870 and married the Dutch-born painter the following year. This image of a sick mother comforted by her daughter appeared in the "Illustrated London News" with a Grovenor Gallery review in May 1888. Laura absorbed from the husband an ability to bring history to life, but focused on seventeenth-century Holland rather than classical Greece and Rome. Here, layers of patterned fabrics are used to define space in a way that recalls William Morris's "La Belle Iseult" (1859 and then with the artist, now at Tate Britain). William Biscombe Gardner skillfully employed the black and white range of his medium to evoke the tonal and textural richness of Alma-Tadema's painting, which includes golden and dark browns in the bed hangings and coverlet, and silky blues in the girl's skirt.
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