In 1895, the year the Lumière brothers screened the first moving picture in Paris, Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted a canvas in London that was, in its own way, a movie.
The painting is called A Coign of Vantage. Even the title suggests a specific, privileged viewpoint. It depicts three women standing on a high marble balcony, looking down over a sheer cliff toward a fleet of galleys returning to the harbor. The sea is an impossible, dazzling blue. The marble is blindingly white. But the true genius of the painting is not what we see, but how we see it.
A Literary Perspective
The title is not random. It is lifted directly from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. In Act 1, Scene 6, Banquo describes a castle's height: "No jutty, frieze, / Buttress, nor coign of vantage, but this bird / Hath made his pendent bed."
A "coign" is a projecting corner that offers a clear view for a nesting bird. Alma-Tadema interprets this literally, placing his subjects—three beautiful women, like birds in a nest—high on an architectural precipice. They are safe, elevated, looking down on the world from a dizzying height.
This choice of perspective was radical. Most Victorian historical paintings were theatrical, showing the action from the "fourth wall." A Coign of Vantage broke that rule. By placing the "camera" (the viewer's eye) high up in the air, Alma-Tadema created a dizzying sense of vertigo. We look down a sheer drop, past the diagonal cut of the balustrade, to a distant horizon. By showing us the women looking down at tiny ships, he suggests an immense world below without actually painting it.
The Color of Heat
If the perspective draws you in, the color holds you there. Art historians frequently cite this painting as the ultimate example of "Tadema Blue."
The Mediterranean sea in the background is painted in a shade of turquoise-lapiz that feels hyper-real. Alma-Tadema was obsessed with the light of the south. He knew that under the mid-day sun, the sea near Capri takes on an opaque intensity that looks nothing like the grey waters of England. He likely used new, synthetic pigments to achieve this saturation, contrasting the deep blue against the warm bronze of the Sphinx statue that sits in the corner.
This bronze beast adds a layer of poetic contrast. While the women are animated—pointing, whispering, waiting for their lovers to return—the Sphinx is stone-still. It represents the eternal, unblinking gaze of history, watching the fleeting excitement of human life with indifference.
The Gaze and the Legacy
There is a hidden narrative in that excitement. The women are crowned with wreaths of ivy, a symbol sacred to Bacchus, the god of celebration. This tells us the fleet below is a returning conqueror or a festival. In a reversal of the traditional Victorian "Male Gaze," where women were objects to be looked at, here the women are the active observers. They own the view.
This masterful combination of storytelling and radical perspective was tailor-made for his audience. By 1895, Alma-Tadema was painting almost exclusively for the American "Gilded Age." This work was commissioned via dealers for John Stewart Kennedy, a wealthy New York banker, who paid a fortune to bring the Mediterranean light to Manhattan.
It did not go unnoticed by other Americans. Decades later, directors like D.W. Griffith (Intolerance) and Cecil B. DeMille (Ben-Hur) looked to Alma-Tadema when designing their epics.
The painting's journey through the 20th century was equally cinematic. In the 1960s, when Victorian art was considered "worthless," it was rescued by an unlikely hero: Allen Funt, the creator of the TV show Candid Camera. Funt was the only major collector buying Tademas during the "Dark Ages" of his reputation, and he owned A Coign of Vantage until his famous collection sale in 1973, keeping the flame alive until the rest of the world caught up.
When A Coign of Vantage sold for $9,738,500 in 2010, the price reflected more than just its technical perfection. It is a pivot point in visual history. It is the moment where painting stopped being static and started to move, anticipating the wide-screen cinema of the century to come.
