_The Vintage_, painted just before Tadema's removal to England, is in some respects one of his most important and most characteristic works. It has been objected that Alma Tadema is essentially a painter of repose. To this picture as well as to the _Pyrrhic Dance_ this criticism cannot be applied. The first thing that strikes us as we look at the work is the sense of motion and music which it imparts. Another of the objections sometimes made to Alma Tadema's work is that his men and women, but more especially his women, are not in accordance with usually recognized classical standards. His favourite types are rather of the heavy build that would be connected more readily with Holland than with Rome, though in some of the portrait busts of empresses preserved in the Vatican, and other sculpture galleries, we see frequent precedents for this preference, a preference that became more and more emphasized after the artist's removal to England. In learning, in technical excellence, in the remarkable finish of all the multitudinous details, the work is admirable. Here, too, he has not permitted the details to distract our attention from the main intention of the picture; we think first and last of the procession and put the accessories, correct and wonderfully painted though they are, into their proper artistic place. Alma Tadema's pictures may at times seem to proclaim too loudly the equality of all visible things, and this equal attention to each object sometimes prevents the concentration of our attention upon the central point of interest. It is this peculiarity which led Ruskin to make his savage and most unfair onslaught upon the painter in his Academy Notes of 1875. The _Sculpture Gallery_, a newer and more skilful version of a previous picture on the same theme, painted in 1864, furnished the tag upon which Ruskin hung his attack. This later _Sculpture Gallery_ was the companion to the Picture Gallery exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1874, which was again a sort of extension of an earlier work called the _Roman Amateur_. In the atrium of a Roman house, a fat swarthy Roman, a man of little distinction, no doubt a _nouveau riche_ of his period, exhibits to his visitors a silver statue. There is an impressive pomposity about his manner, as though he were dilating upon the statue's intrinsic metallic worth rather than upon its artistic merits, and his guests seem to be on the level of his own artistic tastes. In the two versions of the _Sculpture Gallery_ this idea is extended. In the first version the famous Lateran statue of Sophocles was introduced, and indeed forms the central point of interest. Around it are grouped three Romans, one woman and two men, evidently eagerly discussing its artistic merits. All Tadema's fine draughtsmanship, all his unique skill in the painting of lucent surfaces is here to the fore.