Tibullus at Delia's House

In 1864 Ernest Gambart, a Belgian-born dealer who was one of the most powerful picture sellers in London, ordered 24 paintings from a young Dutch artist then living in Brussels, Lawrence Alma-Tadema. This is one of them, finished in 1866. The Roman poet Tibullus, who wrote love elegies to a woman he called Delia, recites to a group of friends in her house. Many of the furnishings, the bronze stool, the folding table and the painting on the wall behind the poet, reproduce real objects found in the ruins of Pompeii. Gambart showed the panel at his London gallery in 1867 and sold it that same year to William Prescott Hunt of Boston, so it crossed the Atlantic within a year of being painted. It reached the Museum of Fine Arts in 1917 with the bequest of Maria Antoinette Evans.