It was on these two fine works, _The Sculpture Gallery_ and _The Picture Gallery_, that Alma Tadema's world-wide reputation was first based. A great continental dealer bought them, and as engravings as well as in the widely exhibited originals they became familiar to all lovers of the beautiful. From this time onward Alma Tadema could not paint fast enough to satisfy the demands made upon his brush; but this success only increased the rigidity of the demands he made upon himself. The more successful Alma Tadema has been, the more conscientious has he become, a rare quality, and one that cannot be too highly praised or too much admired. His passionate love of colour, a passion that seems to have grown upon him as time passed, and as he abandoned more and more his earlier drier manner, found expression after his election as associate to the Royal Academy in a number of small but most perfect little canvases that often dealt with nothing in particular, and to which the artist was at times embarrassed to give names, or whose titles, when found, were not specially distinctive, but which each in their kind was a perfect gem of technique of radiant tints. And after all, why need a picture have a name, _à tout prix_? Whistler was not so wrong when he labelled some of his works as "Symphonies" and "Harmonies" of colour. Such titles would best describe many of Alma Tadema's smaller colour creations. And now, his own line fully found, Tadema worked on steadily, without haste or pause. In a _milieu_ far distant indeed from the scene of their creation, a London atmosphere, a London sky, he caused to live again for a while in effigy the men and maidens of Magna Graecia, of Rome, of Parthenope, and above all of Sicily, for Tadema's out-door scenes are too southern in feeling and in tone even for the furthest shores of the Peninsula, and belong by rights to the Syren isle. Here alone are found the unclouded sapphire skies, the seas sun-bathed and innocent of angry waves, the luxuriant vegetation, the mad wealth of roses that seem to spring by magic from Tadema's brush, and are the outcome of his fervid imagination that can behold these things with his mental vision while fog and grim winter are raging outside. It is one of Tadema's rare and precious gifts that he can see his picture finished before he has put brush to canvas. It is this gift which makes it unnecessary for him to execute the usual amount of sketching, indeed, Tadema may be said not to sketch at all; it is this that lends to his hand his rare security, and this that helps towards his precision of execution. Everything is clearly, sharply outlined in his art. His canvases show no quiet, slumberous distances, no mysterious twilights of life or nature. All is evident, all is distinct, all sharply defined as in the meridional landscape that he loves, and all this is rendered with that accuracy, with those small touches of extreme sharpness, which recall the