Alma Tadema and the Voice in the Wainscoting: Thekla Friedländer (Opus CCVII - 207)

It is a Tuesday evening in London, 1877. Outside, the fog curls against the gas lamps of St. James’s Hall, dampening the clatter of carriage wheels on Piccadilly. Inside, the warm air is thick with anticipation. A young woman steps forward, slight and intense. When she sings, her voice is not an operatic gale but something crystalline—what Alma Tadema himself might have called "sunlight in sound." The critics will write of her "delicate soprano, full of artistic refinement and sympathy."

Her name is Thekla Friedländer. And two years later, Alma Tadema will capture that delicate sympathy in a painting no larger than the palm of a hand.

The Mystery of Opus CCVII

For decades, the Portrait of Thekla Friedlander (Opus CCVII) has been a ghost in the catalogue. We know it existed—Vern Swanson’s definitive catalogue raisonné records it—but its whereabouts are unknown, listed simply as "Place unknown."

What makes it ghostlier still is its size: a mere 11.5 by 8.2 centimeters (4.5 x 3.2 inches).

This tiny scale is not an accident of economy. It is a signature of intimacy. While Alma-Tadema is famous for his "Hall of Panels"—a room lined with narrow, upright portraits of friends—those were generally larger, elongated works designed for specific architectural slots. Opus CCVII is smaller even than those.

It is likely a "cabinet portrait" in the truest sense: a tiny, jewel-like token painted for personal exchange, perhaps intended to sit on a piano forte or be held in the hand like a daguerreotype (an early, precious photograph on silvered copper). To be painted this size by Alma Tadema was to be captured for private affection, not public display.

The Cabinet Portrait Tradition

This work sits within a specific, rarely discussed subset of Alma Tadema's oeuvre: the friendship token. Unlike his grand imperial scenes or the commissioned portraits of wealthy patrons, these small works were gifts. They were painted quickly, often in a single sitting, capturing a spark of personality that the larger, more labored canvases sometimes missed. For Alma Tadema, these were acts of love, not commerce. The small scale forced the viewer to come close, to invade the personal space of the sitter, creating an intimacy that a large gallery oil painting could never achieve.

The Two Theklas

History has not been kind to Miss Friedländer. If you were to search for her name today, you would be led astray by a biographical mirage. Algorithms and encyclopedias often conflate her with a famous contemporary: a severe German social reformer of the same name, born in Silesia, who spent her life inspecting Prussian women’s prisons. Even curators has struggled to distinguish them, leading to confusion in the Alma Tadema archives.

Whatever virtues that noble reformer possessed, she was not the woman who sang Schubert Lieder in Alma Tadema’s gold-leafed studio.

Our Thekla was born on Valentine’s Day, 1850, in Leipzig. Her training was rigorous, forged in the fires of the Leipzig Conservatory under Franz Götze and Carl Reinecke. She was not an amateur; before she ever set foot in London, she had already sung at the hallowed Gewandhaus—the 19th-century equivalent of Carnegie Hall, sanctified by the legacy of Mendelssohn—performing in 1874 under the baton of Reinecke himself. She did not come to England to inspect prisons; she came to enchant.

The Hans Richter Connection

The connection to Alma-Tadema’s inner circle is not just social, but symphonic. New archival evidence from the Richter Concerts (1879-1880) places Thekla Friedländer at the very center of London's avant-garde musical life, often performing alongside Alma-Tadema’s close friend, George Henschel.

On May 12, 1879—the very year this portrait was painted—she sang at St. James's Hall in a concert featuring Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. She appeared again in June 1880 for a monumental performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, sharing the stage with Henschel. These were not casual recitals; they were heavy, intellectual events conducted by Hans Richter, involving the works of Wagner and Liszt.

This context transforms our understanding of the portrait. Friedländer was not merely a "parlor singer" entertainment; she was a serious artist trusted by the titans of British music. In Cambridge, she premiered works by C.V. Stanford—the future father of the British musical renaissance, who would go on to teach Holst and Vaughan Williams. She often performed these heavy roles alongside her contralto partner Auguste Redeker, whilst the programme notes were penned by George Grove himself—the man literally writing the dictionary on music (Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians).

She was engaged with the same heavy, Germanic romanticism that Alma Tadema—himself a lover of Wagner—deeply admired. The painting, then, is a tribute from one heavy-weight artist to another, acknowledging a shared devotion to the sublime. It was here, in this heady atmosphere of serious music and high art, that Alma Tadema found his true peers.

Alma Tadema, never one to let a moment pass unrecorded, picks up a small panel. It is easy to imagine the scene in 1879. The studio at Townshend House is dim, lit by the peculiar, filtered light Alma Tadema engineered. Henschel is at the piano, perhaps playing the mournful opening chords of Brahms' Liebestreu (True Love)—a masterpiece Thekla made a signature of her repertoire from Leipzig to London. Thekla stands by the gold piano, her voice rising into the high, coffered ceiling.

He does not need a large canvas to capture such a voice; he needs only a few inches of oil paint to catch the "artistic refinement" of her expression.

A Voice Lost to Silence

We do not know where the painting is today. Like the music of that Tuesday evening, it has dissipated into the ether, perhaps sitting unrecognized on a descendant's mantlepiece, or tucked away in a drawer, mistaken for a postcard.

But knowing who she was restores a fragment of the painting’s soul. She was not a statistic of social reform. She was a artist of "sympathy," a voice that once filled the rooms we now only see in photographs.

A Glimpse of the Circle

While the painted portrait remains lost, we have a ghostly echo of her world in a group photograph held by the National Portrait Gallery. Titled "Various musical celebrities," it captures the Victorian musical elite. There, caught in bromide, is Thekla herself—listed as sitter #659/660.

She stands, as always, right beside her singing partner Auguste Redeker (#661). The two women appear so frequently together in concert programmes—often billed as an inseparable duet pair—that their proximity here seems inevitable.

We now know where this partnership led. Redeker would go on to marry the eminent throat specialist Sir Felix Semon, becoming the "Lady Semon" immortalized by Alma Tadema in Opus CCXVI (216). It is a telling detail that Thekla was painted first and alone (Opus 207), while Redeker entered the painted archive a year later, sharing a panel with her husband. They remain sister-works in spirit—two halves of a famous duet, captured in oil just as they were in life.

Also present in this visual archive is Alma-Tadema’s best friend, George Henschel (#688), confirming the tight-knit musical circle that surrounded the artist.