“Sunday Morning” by Sir Laurence Alma Tadema OM RA, 1836-1912

Sunday Morning

Sir Laurence Alma Tadema OM RA, 1836-1912

1871?

Oil on wood

400 x 330 mm

Collection: Tate Britain N03527

Bequeathed by R.H. Prance 1920

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Heather Birchall’s 2003 essay on the museum website describes the painting as an “imaginary scene” set in seventeenth-century Netherlands and adds that “a midwife, holding a new born baby, looks out of a window on to the streets lit by the sun . . . The subject of Sunday Morning is evident from an earlier painting of the same scene entitled A Birth Chamber, Seventeenth Century (1868) now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This painting, which is larger than the version at Tate, includes to the left the mother of the child lying on a bed and her servant seated beside her.” This reasoning does not convince, since one can argue even more convincingly that by removing the bed and the new mother, the artist changed the subject, something surely suggested by its title. Furthermore, the large baby in this doesn't look newborn. I suggest the painting represents the Sunday morning of its title in which a mother (or nursemaid) looks out at a sunny day, perhaps dreaming of the child’s future, while an older woman, here a contrast to the woman and young child, looks at a Bible. — George P. Landow

Bibliography

Barrow, R. J. Lawrence Alma-Tadema. London: Phaidon, 2001.

Wood, Christopher. Olympian Dreamers: Victorian Classical Painters. London: Constable, 1983. 106-30.

Last modified 10 July 2018