And this is never so clear as when the subject seems extremely promising

And this is never so clear as when the subject seems extremely promising.The Vintage Festival, for instance, and again A Dedication to Bacchus, have scenes which in other hands could be orgies. He is a master of the anti-expressive face, whose sober neutrality always offers less than you might try to read in it. There are several scenes of amorous dalliance or reverie, but they don’t let anything slip through their surface story Alma-Tadema never tips you the wink. Tepidarium is erotic, but not more erotic than it clearly intends. And looking at Alma-Tadema’s work, you feel you ought to be able to say, “wonderfully over the top!” or “does he really mean to be as saucy as he seems?” The curious thing is, you can’t.Nothing here is in excess Everything in on the level.

High Victorian classicism sounds like an ideal candidate, an occasion for artifice, fantasy and all sorts of turbulent sub-texts – cruelty and eroticism that are overt but not properly conscious. Perhaps the point can be made by saying that it would be almost impossible to take a camp or ironic pleasure in Alma-Tadema That may be surprising. Dullness in art is always difficult to demonstrate, you have to prove negatives; and it’s not simply avoidance of high drama that’s the trouble. And then there is Alma- Tadema’s sheer perfectionism, his painstaking rendering of texture and illumination, with never a wrong touch, but getting in some bold colours too: this can’t but be impressive.And yet.. he is a dull artist. He has a penchant for continuing perspective-construction below floor level, as in the Phidias, where you get a view down through the scaffolding. Often a bit of background is glimpsed through a door or behind a wall and then suddenly cut off by the pictures edge.

Alma-Tadema is always keen to show that antiquity once was new.What’s more, he stresses the everyday “foundness” of his stories with some striking compositions Scenes are viewed off-centre and at odd angles. Or you have Hadrian in England: Visiting a Roman-British Pottery, a sort of archeological joke, with the artefacts that later turned up as buried shards seen at the point of original manufacture. Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends: what a great subject, the most elevated Western artwork at its Private View, the guests milling around on the scaffolding, the sculptor looking modest and the marbles authentically coloured. He doesn’t do mythology or heroic history, but almost always everyday life Even when his topics are famous, his treatment is intimate. But I don’t deny that he is in several ways an intriguing painter.For one thing, his subjects are so down-beat.

He kept up with recent research, made his own investigations of the ancient sites and collected photos of them, so that every bit of furniture and architecture in his scenes, every hairdo, may be sourced and footnoted. I think it’s hard now for us to be as interested as his contemporaries were in what was a big point of pride for Alma-Tadema: archeological authenticity. Of course, by his death in 1912, smart taste was moving far from this sort of thing, but in recent years it has been turning back, lending at least a more sympathetic eye to artists left behind by the usual story of modern art. He produced prolifically, changed his tune very little, and prospered.He’s never been without fans – perfectionism never is – and the Walker’s rooms had a large and absorbed attendance last Friday.