Our Corner (Opus CXVI)

The Alma-Tademas lived at Townshend House on the edge of Regent's Park in London, a short walk from the Regent's Canal, and this small oil panel was painted inside it in 1873. The two girls are the painter's daughters, Laurence and Anna, then eight and six. Their corner is a corner of a house their father had decorated so thoroughly that a visitor called it a Tadema picture you could walk through. He sent the panel to the Dudley Gallery that October as number 235 and gave it his own opus number, 116. Just before five in the morning on 2 October 1874, a barge carrying about five tons of gunpowder exploded on the canal under Macclesfield Bridge. Townshend House was badly damaged, and the architect George Aitchison was brought in to rebuild it. Anna grew up to paint its library in 1884.