This picture was followed by yet others, all inspired by the Merovingian chronicles that had taken such a firm hold upon the artist's imagination. In each successive picture the scheme of colour grew fuller and warmer, the dull manner of the master van Leys was more and more abandoned, the real Alma Tadema made himself more and more felt. His own individuality, his own methods of conception became manifest. This is especially the case in a picture called _Gonthram Bose_, another of the Merovingian series. We here see Alma Tadema already applying his peculiar capacity of filling in every inch of the canvas, thus often giving to the tiniest space a sense of vastness, of distance, of immensity, that renders his smallest works such marvellous gems of concentrated beauty. Of course it took time to learn to do this without arousing a sense of overcrowding, a fault that occurs even in one or two of his later works, but more and more as he advanced this danger was eliminated and the capabilities hidden in this artifice became ever more manifest. The little figures with which he peopled his pictures also steadily advanced in correctness of movement and bore about them a local physiognomy that revived an entire historical epoch in a few square inches of canvas. The whole Merovingian period seemed incarnated in these works. This same capacity of resuscitating a remote historical time was yet more pleasantly revealed when Alma Tadema at last turned from painting these gorgeous but bloodthirsty barbarians, and applied himself instead to the mysterious land of Egypt, the source of all culture and all knowledge, the land he has never seen, but which he has apprehended so wonderfully with the eye of his brain. The German Egyptologist and novelist, George Ebers, a friend of Alma Tadema's, to whom he dedicated one of his historical tales, once asked him what it was that had turned him from his Franks towards the land of Isis. Alma Tadema replied, "Where else should I have begun as soon as I became acquainted with the life of the ancients? The first thing a child learns of ancient history is about the Court of Pharaoh, and if we go back to the source of art and science must we not return to Egypt?"