The painting sells on a Thursday afternoon.
It is 1878, and A Parting Kiss (also called Au Revoir) has just been purchased by a private collector. The canvas depicts a mother and child embracing in farewell at a marble threshold, a Roman street visible beyond. Every fold of fabric, every vein in the marble, rendered with Lawrence Alma Tadema's signature obsession.
The collector pays handsomely. The transaction is complete.
But Alma-Tadema is not finished.
Within twelve hours, he sells the painting again. Not the canvas itself—that is already hanging in the collector's home—but the right to reproduce it. He sells the copyright to his art dealer, who immediately commissions an engraving. The dealer makes £1,500 profit from the prints alone.
Lawrence Alma Tadema writes in his ledger, with the satisfaction of a man who has just been paid twice for the same work: "I sold the painting... plus copyright to my art dealer."
This is the moment when painting became intellectual property.
The Painting Was Just the Prototype
To understand Alma-Tadema's genius, you must forget what you think a painting is.
A painting, in the traditional sense, is a unique object. One canvas. One buyer. One transaction. The artist paints it, sells it, and moves on. The money stops when the paint dries.
Lawrence Alma Tadema did not think this way.
To him, the painting was not the product. It was the prototype. The original canvas was simply the master copy from which thousands of reproductions could be made. The real money was not in the oil on wood—it was in the ink on paper.
Engravings. Etchings. Photogravures. Prints.
These were the products. And they could be sold over and over again, to thousands of buyers, across continents, for decades.
The painting was the seed. The prints were the harvest.
The Separation of Assets
Lawrence Alma Tadema's father was a notary—a Dutch legal professional who dealt in contracts, property rights, and the careful separation of assets. Lawrence inherited this mindset. He understood something that most artists of his generation did not: a painting is two things at once.
It is a physical object (the canvas, the frame, the pigment).
And it is an intellectual property (the image, the composition, the idea).
Most artists sold both together. They handed over the canvas, and with it, the right to do whatever the buyer wanted—including commissioning reproductions without paying the artist a penny.
Lawrence Alma Tadema separated them.
He would sell the physical canvas to a collector for £5,000. Then he would sell the copyright—the right to reproduce the image—to a dealer like Ernest Gambart or L.H. Lefèvre for another £1,000 or more.
Two sales. Two fortunes. One painting.
This was the "double-dip," and it made him richer than any painter before him.
Lawrence Alma Tadema: The Royalty Before the Law
Here is the astonishing part: when Lawrence Alma Tadema began demanding royalties for reproductions, there was no law that required anyone to pay him.
Copyright law in the 19th century was murky at best. In the Netherlands, where he began his career, there was no copyright protection for visual art at all. In Britain, the laws were vague and rarely enforced. Publishers could—and did—reproduce paintings without permission, without payment, without consequence.
Lawrence Alma Tadema did not care.
He demanded royalties anyway.
He wrote to publishers like Sijthoff, insisting that any reproduction of his work required his approval and a payment. He viewed unauthorized reproduction as theft—not of the canvas, but of the image. And he fought for this principle before the law even recognized it.
This was not idealism. It was business.
He understood that if he controlled the copyright, he controlled the supply. And if he controlled the supply, he could set the price.
The Engravers: His Reluctant Partners
The prints were not made by Alma-Tadema himself. They were made by engravers—skilled craftsmen who translated his paintings into etchings and engravings that could be printed in large quantities.
These men were not his collaborators. They were his employees.
And he treated them accordingly.
Leopold Löwenstam, one of the most respected etchers of the Victorian era, worked closely with Lawrence Alma Tadema for years. The two men were friends. Löwenstam had married Alice Search, the nanny to Alma-Tadema's children. In 1883, Alma-Tadema painted Löwenstam's portrait for his 41st birthday—a rare honor—showing him bent over an etching plate, working on a reproduction of an Alma-Tadema painting. They had left their homelands at similar times, both finding success in London, both building their reputations together.
But friendship did not soften business.
Lawrence Alma Tadema reviewed every proof with brutal scrutiny. If the lighting was wrong, if a shadow was too dark, if a fold of drapery did not match the original—he rejected it. In one letter, regarding the etching of A Favourite Author, he wrote to Löwenstam:
"You are childish and infatuated with your work... I decline to sign such works as it stands."
This was not the language of artistic collaboration. This was the language of quality control. Alma-Tadema was the CEO, and the engravers were the factory workers. If the product did not meet his standards, it did not ship.
He understood that every print carried his name. And his name was his brand.
Lawrence Alma Tadema's Global Distribution Network
Through his partnerships with dealers like Ernest Gambart and L.H. Lefèvre, Lawrence Alma Tadema's prints were distributed across the British Empire and beyond.
London. Paris. New York. Sydney. Auckland.
A middle-class family in Melbourne could buy an engraving of The Roses of Heliogabalus for a few pounds and hang it in their parlor. They could not afford the original painting—that cost the price of two houses—but they could afford the image.
And that was the point.
Alma-Tadema was not just selling to millionaires. He was selling to the masses. The prints democratized his work, making it accessible to anyone who could afford a framed engraving. But they also made him rich.
A single painting might sell for £5,000. But the prints from that painting could generate £10,000 or more over the course of a decade.
The painting was the advertisement. The prints were the product.
The Image Is More Valuable Than the Object
Lawrence Alma Tadema understood something in the 1870s that the modern world would not fully grasp until the age of Instagram and NFTs: the image is more valuable than the object.
The original canvas of Spring hangs in the Getty Museum. It is priceless, irreplaceable, and locked behind glass. Most people will never see it in person.
But the image of Spring—the composition, the colors, the idea—has been reproduced millions of times. It has appeared on posters, postcards, book covers, and websites. It has been shared, copied, and reinterpreted across centuries.
The canvas is singular. The image is infinite.
Alma-Tadema knew this. He did not just paint pictures. He created intellectual property. And he monetized it ruthlessly.
Lawrence Alma Tadema's Passive Income Empire
By the 1890s, Alma-Tadema had built what we would now call a passive income empire.
He no longer needed to paint constantly to maintain his wealth. The prints generated revenue year after year, long after the original canvases had been sold. His dealers handled the distribution. His engravers handled the production. He simply collected the royalties.
This was not the life of a struggling artist. This was the life of a landlord, collecting rent on properties he no longer owned.
The paintings were his real estate. The prints were the tenants.
The Conclusion
Lawrence Alma-Tadema did not just sell art.
He sold the right to art.
And that made all the difference.
This is Part 2 of the Empire of Marble trilogy. Continue to Part 3: The CEO to discover the ruthless branding strategies that made him the first modern commercial artist.
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