Promise of Spring

In his later years Alma-Tadema painted many small pictures of young lovers in ancient dress, and this panel of 1890 is one of them, less than 40 centimetres tall. A young man and woman meet at a marble bench under a tree heavy with white blossom, the spring of the title. He bends towards her. She leans back and looks out of the picture at us instead of at him. The museum points out how the arching branches above echo the curves of the two bodies below, and how her gaze is framed between them. The clothes are ancient and so is the marble, painted with the cool polish he was famous for. His signature is on the marble wall at the right, and under it the opus number he gave the work, CCC III, 303 in Roman numerals. In 1910, two years before his death, the panel was reproduced in a book on his later work, credited to the London dealers Arthur Tooth and Sons. By 1939 it belonged to Frances M. Baker of Boston, who left it to the museum that year.