Lawrence Alma-Tadema

Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted marble better than almost anyone, which turned out to be both his gift and his trap. Born in Friesland, trained in Antwerp, settled in London, he built a career on scenes of Roman domestic life rendered with archaeological care. He studied artefacts, collected photographs of ruins, and numbered his paintings with opus numbers like a composer.

The pictures are set in courtyards and baths, with figures lounging on terraces above impossibly blue Mediterranean water. Critics later mocked them as Victorians in togas, which is fair, though it misses how strange the compositions often are. Figures get pushed to the edges. Large areas are given over to empty stone.

He was knighted, made a fortune, then fell out of fashion so completely that his work sold for almost nothing by the 1960s. Hollywood kept the influence alive: the visual language of the Roman epic comes largely from him.