A Coign of Vantage 1895

Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted ‘A Coign of Vantage’ sometime in the late 19th century, likely in London, with oil on panel. The image depicts three women looking out over a balcony into the sea. Alma-Tadema was known in his time for his historical genre paintings that focused on the domestic life of the Greco-Roman world. He was a classicist painter who took great interest in the everyday lives of women in antiquity. This piece, like much of his work, offers a vision of the ancient world that reflects the aesthetic preferences of the Victorian era. He was knighted in 1899, but his work fell out of fashion in the early 20th century, as it came to be seen as overly sentimental and lacking in serious historical insight. To develop a richer and more precise understanding of Alma-Tadema, we can turn to the social history of Victorian England and the institutional history of the art world at that time.