It is Monday, June 9, 1913. The London season is in full swing, but at 44 Grove End Road, the mood is funereal. The great brass doors of "Casa Tadema"—the house that was once the pounding heart of Victorian artistic life—are thrown open to the public. But today, the visitors are not princes, poets, or pianists. They are bidders.
The auctioneers from Hampton & Sons have set up their podiums in the atrium. The catalogue is thick, listing 1,511 lots. It is not just a sale of furniture; it is the autopsy of an era.
The master, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, has been dead for nearly a year. His daughters, Anna and Laurence, have retreated, leaving the house to the mercy of the market. And the market is merciless.
The Estate Agent's Promise
Six months after his death in June 1912, Hampton & Sons had tried to sell the property whole. In December 1912, they produced a lavish brochure titled "Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's World Famous Home", describing it as an "artist’s treasure house, collected by one master mind."
The brochure promised a fantasy: a "magnificent Byzantine studio," a "XVII Century Dutch Room" with shuttered windows, and a "Palm House" that looked out onto "old world matured gardens." It listed a Billiard Room, a Library, and even a "Russian marble fountain." But the "unique residence" did not find a savior. The house that was collected by one mind was about to be scattered to a thousand.
The House That Was a Poem
To understand the tragedy of this week, you must understand what was being sold. Casa Tadema was not merely a residence; it was a Gesamtkunstwerk—a total work of art.
Lawrence Alma-Tadema had spent three decades and a fortune transforming this villa in St. John’s Wood into a fantasy of the ancient world. Visitors would ascend a staircase of burnished brass that glowed like solid gold, a psychological transition designed to lift them from the grey London fog into the artist’s perpetual Mediterranean noon.
They would pass into the Great Studio, a room built to the proportions of a Roman basilica, capped by a semi-circular apse lined with cold aluminum. This was an engineering marvel of the 1880s—a silver skin that reflected a cool, unwavering light onto his models, allowing him to paint the distinct, crisp shadows of the Italian sun while standing under a rainy English sky.
The house was a stage set for a life lived as art. And now, lot by lot, the set was being struck.
The Hammer Falls on Friendship
The most painful losses were not the chairs or the rugs. They were the memories.
The catalogue lists the contents of the "Hall of Panels," a long, white corridor that served as a guest book for the artistic elite. Over the years, every great painter who visited was invited to fill a narrow, vertical panel in the wainscoting.
Essentially, the walls themselves were an art gallery.
Lord Leighton had painted there. John Singer Sargent. Sir Edward Poynter. Sir Frank Dicksee. Forty-five panels in total—a unique monument to Victorian friendship. A museum would have preserved the room whole. But the auctioneers saw only individual assets.
The panels were ripped from the walls. The "guest book" was torn apart page by page. Lot 603, "Apple Blossoms" by Alfred Parsons. Lot 604, a sketch by Sargent. The unity of the collection, the physical evidence of the brotherhood of artists, was shattered for a few hundred pounds.
The Verdict of the Market
What makes the 1913 sale so historically poignant is the silence of the sums.
Just ten years prior, Alma-Tadema was the wealthiest artist in Britain. His paintings sold for sums that could buy country estates. But on this week in June, the bids were sluggish.
The "Victorian High Art" bubble had burst. The Post-Impressionists were the new darlings of the critics. The heavy, perfumed opulence of Alma-Tadema’s world suddenly felt suffocating to a generation looking towards the machine age.
The famous props—the leopard skins, the marble benches, the lyres—were sold as second-hand bric-a-brac. Many of these items were immortalized in his masterpieces, such as The Roses of Heliogabalus. Looking at that painting now, we are seeing a catalogue of the auction itself: the leopard skins (Lot 402?), the silver bowl, the textiles—all dispersed to the winds.
Specific treasures mentioned in the New York Times report of the sale include:
- The "Autograph" Piano: A custom model designed by Alma-Tadema with parchment panels inside the lid, signed by every great musician who played there: Joachim, Sarasate, Paderewski. (Sold as furniture).
- The Marquand Settee's Twin: A semi-circular ivory and ebony settee with "swan's head terminals and carbuncle eyes"—a twin to the famous one he designed for the Marquand mansion in New York.
- The Roman Couch: A studio prop designed by the artist, with one side in carved cedar and the other in sycamore inlaid with mother-of-pearl.
The library, his "working brain" of thousands of archaeological photographs, was bundled up and carted off. The sale raised a "pittance." It was a public declaration that the world had moved on.
The Daughters' Dilemma
The burden of this dismantling fell on Anna and Laurence Alma-Tadema.
They were two unmarried women in their late 40s. They had been raised in a palace, but they did not inherit a kingdom. Their father’s income relied on his hand and his eye; when he died, the golden tap turned off.
Moreover, the sale was not a choice; it was an instruction. Sir Lawrence’s will explicitly directed that his estate be realized to provide a trust for his daughters’ future support. With the value of his existing stock collapsing, they faced a stark reality: they could not afford the coal to heat the basilica, and the law required them to sell it.
They sold because they had to survive. After the sale, they quietly slipped into "reduced circumstances." Anna, a talented artist in her own right, painted for a "frugal livelihood." Laurence turned her passion to the cause of Polish independence, finding a new purpose in philanthropy.
While the Hammer Fell: A Daughter's Devotion
There is one story from that dark week that proves Anna was not merely "cashing out."
In the Dining Room hung a large panel of embossed leather (Lot 323), decorated with swallows and fruit. Sir Lawrence had loved it, believing it to be 16th-century Italian (though it was actually a high-quality 19th-century French piece). He had intended to leave it to the Victoria & Albert Museum, but died before he could edit his will.
Bound by the legal terms of the estate, Anna could not just give it away. She had to watch it go under the hammer.
But she didn't let it go. On the day of the auction, Anna sat in the room and bid on her own father's favorite item. She won it back, paying out of her own limited pocket. A month later, she wrote to the museum: "Fortunately for me it was at a low enough figure to enable me to purchase it, and I want to carry out his wish and present it in his name."
That panel (Accession No. W.42-1913) still resides in the V&A storerooms today—a quiet testament to a daughter who honored her father’s wishes even as his world was being dismantled around her.
The Empty Shell
When the auctioneers left on June 16, Casa Tadema was a shell. The aluminum dome remained, staring down at an empty floor where the "Russian marble fountain" once stood. The "Billiard Room" and the "Dutch Room" were stripped bare.
In the 1920s, the house was converted into apartments. Partitions were erected in the great open spaces. The "Palace of the Beautiful" was chopped up into flats.
Today, those haunting black-and-white photographs from the 1912 estate brochure—showing the Studio with its glimpse of the apse and the Inner Hall—are all that remain of the dream. They document the precise moment before the Golden Age of Victorian art was sold off to the highest bidder, and carried away in the rain.
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