Anna Alma Tadema’s The Closing Door – Strains and Colours
The Closing Door, Anna Alma-Tadema, watercolor and gouache, roughly 21 x 14 in. (52 x 35 cm). Hyperlink is to earlier sale on Christie’s; I don’t know the present location of the unique.
Anna Alma-Tadema is commonly (if not at all times) overshadowed by the repute of her extra well-known father, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, and unjustly so. The youthful Alma-Tadema is a watercolorist with a excessive diploma of talent and creative sensibility.
On this scene, she creates an emotional second that requires us to look carefully into the portray to grasp its depth. As the girl clutches each at her costume and at her necklace — her upturned face half vacant, half distressed — the shadowed door behind her is being pulled closed by a determine whose presence we solely encounter by barely observed palms on the door.
Rejection? The top of a love affair? Maybe the flowers and writing supplies on the deak give us further clues. We’re left to compose our personal story across the scene, however the sense of strained emotion is palpable.
Alma-Tadema’s different topics have been typically room interiors, through which her eye for element, floor texture and the delicate play of sunshine have been masterfully advised in painstaking watercolor method. Right here, these abilities supply a composed, elaborate setting for the second — by no means distracting, however there for our visible pleasure as our eye travels to absorb all the scene.
