It seems incredible, and yet it is true, that this composition, a large one for Alma Tadema, with its five figures and innumerable accessories, was entirely painted in the brief space of two months. Still, though completed in so short a time, the preliminary studies, including an abandoned picture, which was to have been called _Plato_, filled eight months of close application. [Illustration: SAPPHO.] Not unlike in general treatment and in general purpose to the _Reading from Homer_ is the picture simply entitled _Sappho_. In order to properly comprehend this work, however, some knowledge of the life story of the Greek poetess is required. Not a few visitors to the Royal Academy, where the picture was exhibited, imagined, with pardonable inaccuracy, that the seated figure playing the lute, and which certainly, at first sight, seems the most prominent, filled the title role. Instead, this is Alcaeus, the man who desired to gain the support of the mighty and gifted Sappho, for a political scheme of which he was the chief promoter. But besides being a political rhymer, Alcaeus was also Sappho's lover, and as he is here rendered, it is the lover who is most emphasized. Sappho herself sits behind a species of desk, on which rests the wreath, bound with ribands, that was the crown of poets. She is robed in pale green and gray, and in accordance with tradition, her raven black hair is filleted with violets. Beside her stands a young girl, her daughter, a sweetly graceful form, less lovely than the mother, but suggestive of maidenhood's enchantments. The poetess is seated on the lowest tier of the marble triple-rowed exedra, on which, at a respectful distance, are also disposed some of the pupils of her school. Dark, wide-branched fir trees spread their crowns above this bench. We are made to realize that their trunks are rooted far below, there where the deep blue sea, shimmering in the background, laps the earth that supports this scene. Through the branches is seen the sky, a sky of purest sapphire, a blue distinct from that of the tideless tranquil ocean, but no less glorious or intense. Nowhere perhaps better than here has Tadema reproduced the effects of summer seas and skies in their brilliant ardour, their palpitating delicacy of hue and texture. The very air that pervades the picture is hot and light, saturated and quivering with the quickening pulsation of a southern sun.