Eine Lesung aus Homer

The banker Henry Marquand commissioned this in 1882 for his mansion going up on Madison Avenue in New York, part of a Greek-themed music room that Alma-Tadema helped design. What he got was an invented scene from ancient Greece: a young man crowned with laurel reading Homer aloud from a scroll while a few friends sprawl on a marble bench above a bright sea. Alma-Tadema was famous for painting marble so convincingly you could almost feel its cold, and he laid the whole thing out on a long, low horizontal to suit a domestic wall. Marquand later ran into money trouble and sold much of his collection; this canvas fetched 30,000 dollars in 1903 and reached Philadelphia two decades on.