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 hundreds of paintings featuring scenes from antiquity, this small group had by the 1880s grown into a flourishing artistic tradition.
Inspired by archaeological discoveries, displays of antiquities, and archaeological publications, Classical Revival painting was closely connected to the exhibition of Assyrian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman artefacts in the British Museum. With their detailed renderings of ancient objects and architecture, this group of prominent Victorian artists produced highly evocative images of life in antiquity. Primarily based in London, where many of them created renowned studio homes and frequently socialised together, this community of artists included Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), Albert Joseph Moore (1841-1893), George Frederic Watts (1817-1904), Frederick Goodall (1822-1904), Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836-1912), Edward Poynter (1836-1919), Edwin Long (1829-1891), Edward Armitage (1817-1896) and John William Waterhouse (1849-1917). With the exception of Alma-Tadema, who was born in the Netherlands and moved to London in 1870, these artists were all British, but most had travelled and trained in Italy, France, and beyond. Leighton was considered the pioneer or major proponent of the movement and had an influential role in inspiring artists such as Edward Poynter to pursue a career in Classical Revival painting.
Within the group, Alma-Tadema, Poynter, and Long were distinguished by their passion for incorporating archaeological detail in their pictures. Although they shared the wider interest of the Classical Revival school in pursuing a different evocation of antiquity by moving away from the depiction of drama, action, and epic events, these three artists enlisted archaeological details in order to convey the intimate contexts of daily life. They also shared an interest in reconstructing ancient Egyptian scenes, and in a body of about 60 such pictures they promoted an ‘archaeological school’ of painting. My own recent study of their Egyptian-themed paintings – Painting Antiquity: ancient Egypt in the art of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Edward Poynter and Edwin Long – demonstrates how their work attracted great interest from audiences hungry for a glimpse into the rituals of life in antiquity. It shows, too, how their pictures generated influential new visions of ancient Egypt.
