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Painting Antiquity: visions of Egypt
Three Victorian artists – Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter, and Edwin Long – helped to shape our image of the distant past. Stephanie Moser describes how their passion for archaeology and love of domestic objects produced a wealth of detailed, descriptive paintings.
For millennia, artists have enjoyed a love affair with the ancient past. In Classical Greece, they found creative inspiration in the Bronze Age civilisation of the Mycenaeans. In the time of the Roman Empire, they looked back with reverence to Greece. Rome itself became a source of fascination to artists of the early Italian Renaissance, who themselves offered a guiding light to the Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid 19th century. No group, however, has shown greater ‘reverence for the antique’ – as The Art Journal put it in 1871, when announcing its formation – than the school now widely referred to as the Victorian Classical Revival. As evidenced by the exhibition of hund
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