The elder classical painters thought to render their work more truly classical by placing their protagonists in large empty monumental spaces, just as Corneille and Racine thought to give the true classical ring to their plays when they removed them from every-day emotions, and rolled out high-sounding and rhetorical phrases. Alma Tadema, instead, is convinced that these dead-and-gone folk were in all fundamental essentials like to ourselves, that they lived, loved, joked and chattered just as we do, and this conviction has found expression in his pictures that deal less and less with the graver, grander moments of their existence, and more with the petty intimate details of their home life. His pictures might almost be said to be a series of instantaneous reproductions of the life of the Roman patricians. The plebs have no interest for him, they rarely figure in his canvases, and when they do their figures are entirely subordinate. The Roman of Alma Tadema's pictures abides in a world of idle luxury, in which nothing matters much unless it ministers to sensuous enjoyment. It is the outward seeming of life and objects that attracts him, their inner deeper meaning matters to him as little as their subject. The life aim of his men and women seems to be to exist happily and placidly, untroubled by material cares or disturbing emotions. In his method of composing his pictures Alma Tadema's manner is also the absolute antithesis of what is commonly regarded as the classic method. So far is he from putting his principal personages well into the middle of his canvas, from following a pyramidal arrangement, that in his effort to be natural and unconventional, he even at times commits extravagances in order to escape from the beaten path, as, for example, in his portrait of Dr. Epps, in which there are shown one head and a bust, no arms, but three hands, the third being that of the unseen patient whose pulse the physician is supposed to feel. This is an extreme instance, but a tendency to dismember his figures, to show us only half a figure, a detached head, a hand without a body, a foot without a visible leg, occurs every now and again, and not certainly to the detriment of a realistic effect, but most certainly to the detriment of composition as classically understood. This tendency, no doubt, results from his love of Japanese art, an art that has had a visible influence upon his methods of disposing his composition. Indeed, it might almost be said that Alma Tadema does not compose his pictures at all. He certainly does not do so according to the ordinary acceptance of the term in art, he rather disposes his personages about his canvas, apparently at hazard, much as they might group themselves in real life. But under this seeming negligence, is hidden great care, immense painstaking, a striving to give to his pictures their maximum of expressive force, for in Alma Tadema's work, everything as well as every person, has its suggestive