Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema

Laura Epps was in her late teens when she met Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a Dutch painter who had recently settled in London and lost his first wife. He gave her painting lessons, and in 1871 they married, she at 19, becoming stepmother to his two young daughters. The lessons grew into a painting career of her own.

Working as Laura Theresa Alma-Tadema, she made quiet domestic scenes of women and children, often dressed and furnished in the manner of 17th-century Dutch painting, that world of hushed interiors and household tasks. She began exhibiting in 1873, at both the Royal Academy in London and the Salon in Paris, and grew popular across Britain and the Continent. Eighteen of her paintings hung at the Royal Academy over her lifetime. She died in 1909, and the Fine Art Society in London gathered her work for a memorial show the year after.